From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Erica Bauermeister
Some storytellers are literary magicians who can capture a situation and spin it out, remembering details like pink hair curlers or the smell of the dark space under a back porch. They take the everyday and invest it with significance and life. Reading the stories in The Lover of Horses is like sitting at the feet of a kind, knowing woman whose hands are endlessly full of yarn, knitting something fantastic out of what is, after all, sheep hair. One story shows what happens when you bring together a woman, her Avon lady, and a fortune teller. Then there is the wife who comes to understand the worth of her short, balding husband; a widow who realizes what her loveless marriage meant to her and to her husband; the daughter who comes home to her dying father. Tess Gallagher shows us people reaching across small and large spaces, bouncing off each other, meeting for moments, or living together for years. Through her stories they become fascinating and beautiful, as full of depth and texture as plain cotton cloth when viewed through a microscope. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14.


From the Back Cover
The Lover of Horses
Tess Gallagher

"[Tess Gallagher is] an excellent writer of prose who savors the elegance of simplicity and whose stories resonate and linger."--Bette Pesetsky, New York Times Book Review

"In this debut collection poet Tess Gallagher shows herself to be a compelling teller of tales. She has a fine ear, a fine eye, and a magician's impeccable timing."--Judith Foosaner, Los Angeles Times

"The day-to-day lives in The Lover of Horses are mined wth small, extraordinary moments of epiphany and unsettling insight."--Elizabeth Alexander, Washington Post Book World

Tess Gallagher's previous publications include Amplitude: New and Selected Poems, A Concert of Tenses (essays on poetry), and Moon Crossing Bridge. She lives in Port Angeles, Washington, where she has recently completed the introduction to No Heroics, Please, the first of two volumes of The Uncollected Works of Raymond Carver, edited by William Stull.



About the Author
Tess Gallagher's previous publications include Amplitude: New and Selected Poems, A Concert of Tenses (essays on poetry), and Moon Crossing Bridge. She lives in Port Angeles, Washington, where she has recently completed the introduction to No Heroics, Please, the first of two volumes of The Uncollected Works of Raymond Carver, edited by William Stull.