Steve O’Brien picked up the phone on Sunday, April 10th, the day after the Wood Memorial, and before I finished identifying myself, he asked, “What happened to Uncle Mo?” O’Brien is a racing fan. He grew up in Grand Island, Nebraska, and broke his racing maiden at Fonner Park. “I first went with my family…
A crowd of about 30 filled the back of BookCourt in Cobble Hill last night to hear Jaimy Gordon read from and talk about her National Book Award winning novel, Lord of Misrule. Earlier in the day, Gordon learned that the book was named a finalist for the Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award, presented by Castleton…
Photographer Juliet Harrison describes herself as “your typical horse crazy kid.” Perhaps atypically, she knows exactly when that horse craziness hit. “When I was five years old,” she recalled recently by phone from her home in the Hudson Valley, “I had a babysitter who gave me a picture book of horse breeds. I still have…
“…The sport’s expansion…led to angst among large numbers of its most elite participants. They lamented the passing of previous decades, when, at least as they recalled it, horse racing was dedicated to pure sport and not to crass commercialism. As events had evolved, the sport’s rapid expansion had given rise to a three-headed monster: the…
In 2010, my racing and literary worlds collided spectacularly when Jaimy Gordon’s Lord of Misrule came out of nowhere to win the National Book Award, catapulting both book and author right into this country’s literary conversation and splendidly blending books and the backstretch. If you’re a literary type, you can’t ignore the National Book Award…
Brooklyn Backstretch 