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by Richard Kelly Kemick
Taut, stylish stories take on big moral questions from surprising perspectives.
A teenager's job mucking stalls at a dog track takes a strange turn when his co-worker finds a new religion at odds with winning streaks. Two brothers set out in search of fame upon the frozen waters of a subarctic lake. After her mother's death, a high school student tries to make rent by winning the Unitarian Church's Annual Young Writer's Short Story Competition. An incarcerated man considers the nature of justice between shifts with his fellow inmates at Nations at War, the ultimate live-action experience for tourists eager to learn about the Canadian Civil War.
Spanning states and provinces, and featuring an apocalypse, a coterie of ghosts, nuns on ice, and an above-average number of dogs, the stories in Hello, Horse consider the mirage of authenticity and the impact of decisions we make—for better and for worse.
"The tales here mix whimsy, weirdness, lust, and Canadian politics, bringing to mind George Saunders and the slackers from Wayne's World ... He has a penchant for alternating between things familiar and bizarre ... Provocative, entertaining short fiction." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"The animal world interacts with the human one in confounding and sometimes wondrous ways in Kemick's first collection, which abounds with the poet's sideways, observational writing." —Globe and Mail (UK)
"Richard Kelly Kemick's Hello, Horse is wildly original and filled with astonishing moments. A wonderful collection that resonates long after reading." —Don Gillmor, author of Breaking and Entering
"Hello, Horse is beguiling and wondrous, with talking dogs and nuns at the end of the world, images that linger with strange pleasure; Richard Kelly Kemick is a stellar wordsmith." —Mark Anthony Jarman, author of Burn Man
This information about Hello, Horse was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Richard Kelly Kemick is an award-winning poet, journalist, and fiction writer. His limited series podcast, Natural Life, is an intimate and unexpectedly honest documentary on his cousin, who is serving a life sentence without parole in Michigan. Richard is also the author of I Am Herod (also on audiobook), which takes readers undercover at one of the world's largest religious events, and Caribou Run, a collection of poetry. He is the recipient of multiple awards including two National Magazine Awards and the Writers' Guild of Alberta's 2019 Award for Best Short Story. He lives in Rossland, British Columbia.
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