Reading at Antioch, Thursday, Jan.17

National Book Award winner Jaimy Gordon ‘66
to present reading and talk at Antioch College

The Antioch Review the Antioch College Writing Institute will host a special reading by 2010 National Book Award winner Jaimy Gordon, beginning at 7 p.m., Thursday, January 17, in McGregor Hall on the College’s campus. The event is free and open to the public, but seating is limited.

In addition to a reading from Gordon’s latest novel, Lord of Misrule, the event will include a book signing and question and answer session.

Gordon, a 1966 graduate of Antioch College, is the author of four novels. In addition to the National Book Award for Fiction, Lord of Misrule was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award; it also won the Tony Ryan Award for the year’s best book about horse racing and was longlisted for the Indie Booksellers Choice Award for 2011. Published on November 15, 2010 and now in its third printing, Lord of Misrule is a national bestseller with more than 45,000 hardcover copies in print.

Gordon’s previous novels include Bogeywoman, She Drove Without Stopping, and Shamp of the City-Solo. She has been a Fellow of the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, and has also won an Academy-Institute Award for her fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Gordon currently teaches at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo and in the Prague Summer Program for Writers.

From the publisher: Lord of Misrule
At the rock-bottom end of the sport of kings sits the ruthless and often violent world of cheap horse racing, where trainers and jockeys, grooms and hotwalkers, loan sharks and touts are all struggling to take an edge, or prove their luck, or just survive. Equal parts Nathanael West, Damon Runyon and Eudora Welty, Lord of Misrule follows five characters -- scarred and lonely dreamers in the American grain -- through a year and four races at Indian Mound Downs, downriver from Wheeling, West Virginia.

Horseman Tommy Hansel has a scheme to rescue his failing stable: He'll ship four unknown but ready horses to Indian Mound Downs, run them in cheap claiming races at long odds, and then gut out fast before anyone notices. The problem is, at this rundown riverfront half-mile racetrack in the Northern Panhandle, everybody notices -- veteran groom Medicine Ed, Kidstuff the blacksmith, old lady "gyp" Deucey Gifford, stall superintendent Suitcase Smithers, eventually even the ruled-off "racetrack financier" Two-Tie and the ominous leading trainer, Joe Dale Bigg. But no one bothers to factor in Tommy Hansel's go-fer girlfriend, Maggie Koderer. Like the beautiful, used-up, tragic horses she comes to love, Maggie has just enough heart to wire everyone's flagging hopes back to the source of all luck.