The Fall of Heartless Horse

“Tumultuous and beautiful, an emotional inquiry into writing and the nature of illusion, so highly pleasurable, a surprise and triumph for the American novel.” —Claude Simon, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

The Fall of Heartless Horse is a postmodern multigenerational family drama that is dark, hilarious, moving, and wildly original. By turns lyric, comic, and tragic, it deals with greed, inheritance, heroism, capitalism, sex, and the intertwining of public and private histories. Kinney has brought to life an amazing cast of characters with a “novella in verse” combining elements from ancient Scottish sagas, songs, legal documents, new age literature, and interviews. This startling, inventive debut, which draws on traditions of both poetry and prose, has been compared with the works of Lewis Carroll and Anne Carson, and evokes qualities of opera, epic, and melodrama as well. A soaring energetic, one-of-a-kind text, The Fall of Heartless Horse explodes different forms, gutting and reanimating them. Here is a deeply affecting tale of ruthlessness, loss, rivalry, and the difficulty of finding one’s place in the world.