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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
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ON SWIFT HORSES

Shannon Pufahl

A lonely newlywed and her wayward brother-in-law follow divergent and dangerous paths through the postwar American West.

Muriel is newly married and restless, transplanted from her rural Kansas hometown to life in a dusty bungalow in San Diego. The air is rich with the tang of salt and citrus, but the limits of her new life seem to be closing in: She misses her freethinking mother, dead before Muriels nineteenth birthday, and her sly, itinerant brother-in-law, Julius, who made the world feel bigger than she had imagined. And so she begins slipping off to the Del Mar racetrack to bet and eavesdrop, learning the language of horses and risk.

Meanwhile, Julius is testing his fate in Las Vegas, working at a local casino where tourists watch atomic tests from the roof, and falling in love with Henry, a young card cheat. When Henry is eventually discovered and run out of town, Julius takes off to search for him in the plazas and dives of Tijuana, trading one city of dangerous illusions and indiscretions for another.

On Swift Horses is a debut of astonishing power: a story of love and luck, of two people trying to find their place in a country that is coming apart even as it promises them everything.

Shannon Pufahl grew up in rural Kansas as the daughter of a working class family. She is a Jones Lecturere in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford. She is a PhD candidate in American Literature and Culture. She is the recipient of the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and a Centennial Teaching Award at Stanford.

Available products
Book Published 2019-11-05 by Riverhead
Book Published 2019-11-05 by Riverhead

Comments

"Achingly beautiful ... Pufahl's language glitters from the page ... [a] restless, blistering fever dream that feels a lot like life."

UK: sold to Fourth Estate

"Imagine a cross between "Revolutionary Road" and "Battleborn" (with a little bit of "Brokeback Mountain" thrown in) and you might end up with something akin to Pufahl's debut, a rich and rugged suburban western about dreams deferred and living defiantly."

"As powerful and wild as [a] mustang . . . Pufahl creates a potent sense of place."

Once in a rare while you come across a novel of such transfixing beauty that it enlarges your faith in the medium itself. On Swift Horses is, for me, one of those books. As an exploration of life lived in the outer distances of plain sight, it is suffused with hazard and touched by grace, furnished with the longevity of a postwar classic and the immediacy of the present tense. It is, simply put, a masterpiece.

"Pufahl paints her characters with remarkable compassion and decency ... Her lyrical prose depicts an American West that is both desolate and beautiful and inspires a sense of individuality that can apply to much more of the human experience than we've previously been led to believe."

On Swift Horses is about both risk and the risqué, about daring to know, name, and act on our own desires. There are plenty of tales about stepping out into the light, here, thank god, is novel about the particularly queer courage it takes to move into the shadows. Pufahl limns the borders of the prodigal and the moral, and there - among the seedy hotels, the off-duty sailors, the noise and dust of the horse races, in Tijuana and in Vegas - she finds new forms of fidelity and care. Read this book for the adventure, for the keening lyricism of the lost and searching, but mostly read this book because no one writes like Shannon Pufahl. Her voice is muscular, awesome, and pure. This book knocked me flat on my back.

"[An] engrossing, melancholy debut novel [with] echoes of Don Carpenter's "Hard Rain Falling", Leonard Gardner's "Fat City" and Patricia Highsmith's "The Price of Salt". ... Pufahl's prose is consistently lyrical and deeply observant. ... She evokes the fear and possibility of life in a new place, with new emotions. She writes with a grace and force that's rare even among seasoned writers."

"Odyssean. . . . Pufahl's voice is strikingly solid, timeworn but not nostalgic, as she unravels a cinematic story that avoids genre clichés or sentimentality. The spaces she creates for her characters - San Diego's languid Chester Hotel hiding in plain sight, Tijuana rendered as an underworld - have the aura of realms."

More than that, though, Pufahl offers exquisite prose. Her style is slow and deliberate but also compelling because her language is so lyrical and specific. Consider Muriel's first glimpse of the thoroughbreds: "They are tall and obdurate and only lightly controlled." The book is filled with such rhythmically lovely, splendidly evocative, and masterfully precise descriptions. In these moments, it feels like Pufahl could not possibly have said what she needed to say with any other words. Fiction to linger over.