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A Collapse of Horses
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Published:
Coffee House Press 2016
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Description
A stuffed bear's heart beats with the rhythm of a dead baby, Reno keeps receding to the east no matter how far you drive, and in a mine on another planet, the dust won't stop seeping in. In these stories, Evenson unsettles us with the everyday and the extraordinary—the terror of living with the knowledge of all we cannot know.
Praise for Brian Evenson:
"Brian Evenson is one of the treasures of American story writing, a true successor both to the generation of Coover, Barthelme, Hawkes and Co., but also to Edgar Allan Poe."—Jonathan Lethem
"One of the most provocative, inventive, and talented writers we have working today." The Believer
"There is not a more intense, prolific, or apocalyptic writer of fiction in America than Brian Evenson." —George Saunders
“Brian Evenson is one of the few who will still be read a hundred years from now: either by our grandchildren, or by the machines who have killed our grandchildren." —Hobart, “An interview with Brian Evenson"
"Packed with enough atrocities to give Thomas Harris pause. . . . Not many writers have the imagination or the audacity to transform what looks like salvation into an utterly original outpost of hell." Bookforum
“Evenson's writing is something to be read in short intervals, like a good tea that you want to savor to the last drop." Twin Cities Geek
Praised by Peter Straub for going "furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice"
Brian Evenson has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and is the World Fantasy Award and the winner of the International Horror Guild Award, the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel, and one of Time Out New York's top books.|A provocative collection of literary horror stories by one of America's most acclaimed and inventive writers whose unique prose "can be soul-shaking" (New Yorker). "Preoccupied with the uncanny, the unsettling, and the unknowable" (The Los Angeles Review), Evenson's seventeen stories in this collection "evoke Kafka, some Poe, some Beckett, some Roald Dahl, and . . . Stephen King" (The New York Times Sunday Book Review). Whether it's a stuffed bear's heart that beats with the rhythm of a dead baby, or the city of Reno that keeps receding to the east no matter how far you drive, or a mine on another planet where the dust won't stop seeping in, the astonishing stories in A Collapse of Horses range from horror to science fiction to noir and all the weird, edgy places in between. Wherever Evenson takes you in his minimalist horror, he "doesn't shy away from blood, murder, apparitions, surrealism, dreams, torture, and weirdness, but he also refrains from letting those elements take over" (Electric Lit).
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Format:
Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
Street Date:
01/18/2016
Language:
English
ISBN:
9781566894142
ASIN:
B0C6V55PQQ
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Brian Evenson. (2016). A Collapse of Horses. Coffee House Press.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Brian Evenson. 2016. A Collapse of Horses. Coffee House Press.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Brian Evenson, A Collapse of Horses. Coffee House Press, 2016.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Brian Evenson. A Collapse of Horses. Coffee House Press, 2016.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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Date Added:
Jun 12, 2018 18:41:28
Date Updated:
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        Brian Evenson: Praised by Peter Straub for going “furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice," Brian Evenson has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the World Fantasy Award and the winner of the International Horror Guild Award, the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel, and one of Time Out New York's top books. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and three O. Henry Prizes, Evenson lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University's Literary Arts Program.

      • name: Brian Evenson
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title
A Collapse of Horses
fullDescription
A stuffed bear's heart beats with the rhythm of a dead baby, Reno keeps receding to the east no matter how far you drive, and in a mine on another planet, the dust won't stop seeping in. In these stories, Evenson unsettles us with the everyday and the extraordinary—the terror of living with the knowledge of all we cannot know.
Praise for Brian Evenson:
"Brian Evenson is one of the treasures of American story writing, a true successor both to the generation of Coover, Barthelme, Hawkes and Co., but also to Edgar Allan Poe."—Jonathan Lethem
"One of the most provocative, inventive, and talented writers we have working today." The Believer
"There is not a more intense, prolific, or apocalyptic writer of fiction in America than Brian Evenson." —George Saunders
“Brian Evenson is one of the few who will still be read a hundred years from now: either by our grandchildren, or by the machines who have killed our grandchildren." —Hobart, “An interview with Brian Evenson"
"Packed with enough atrocities to give Thomas Harris pause. . . . Not many writers have the imagination or the audacity to transform what looks like salvation into an utterly original outpost of hell." Bookforum
“Evenson's writing is something to be read in short intervals, like a good tea that you want to savor to the last drop." Twin Cities Geek
Praised by Peter Straub for going "furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice"
Brian Evenson has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and is the World Fantasy Award and the winner of the International Horror Guild Award, the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel, and one of Time Out New York's top books.|A provocative collection of literary horror stories by one of America's most acclaimed and inventive writers whose unique prose "can be soul-shaking" (New Yorker). "Preoccupied with the uncanny, the unsettling, and the unknowable" (The Los Angeles Review), Evenson's seventeen stories in this collection "evoke Kafka, some Poe, some Beckett, some Roald Dahl, and . . . Stephen King" (The New York Times Sunday Book Review). Whether it's a stuffed bear's heart that beats with the rhythm of a dead baby, or the city of Reno that keeps receding to the east no matter how far you drive, or a mine on another planet where the dust won't stop seeping in, the astonishing stories in A Collapse of Horses range from horror to science fiction to noir and all the weird, edgy places in between. Wherever Evenson takes you in his minimalist horror, he "doesn't shy away from blood, murder, apparitions, surrealism, dreams, torture, and weirdness, but he also refrains from letting those elements take over" (Electric Lit).
reviews
      • premium: False
      • source: Windsor Independent
      • content: "For fans of Stephen King, Kafka, and Lovecraft, A Collapse of Horses is a delightfully terrifying collection."
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        October 19, 2015
        Admirers of Evenson (Windeye; Altmann’s Tongue) applaud the edge he maintains between the unexplained and the intimate. This latest collection continues to explore that line, and for how much is left obscured, an eerie emotional echo remains. In the title story, a man who has suffered a head injury perceives, among other surreal developments, a pile of listless horses. Unable to tell if they are dead or alive, the man is further disturbed by a fellow he sees filling the horses’ trough, as if he either hasn’t yet noticed the state of the horses or has gone mad with denial. In “BearHeart,” the strongest story, Lisa and Michael are expecting a baby. But after Lisa miscarries late in her pregnancy, a teddy bear equipped with a recording of what had been the baby’s heartbeat haunts the couple. “Black Bark” presents two old
        outlaws, riding stolen horses through unforgiving terrain, wondering which one will die first. Sometimes, however, how much Evenson withholds is less successful. In “The Dust,” the collection’s longest story, men with Viking-sounding names, like Grimur and Orvar, work in a kind of intergalactic outpost factory, isolated and at the mercy of their machinery. When things start to go very badly for the men, their lack of backstory or context detracts from the suspense rather than adding to it. Overall, though, Evenson’s journey along the boundaries of short fiction make for an eye-opening dissection of the form.

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        November 1, 2015
        Atmospheric, sometimes-nightmarish tales by the ever macabre Evenson (Windeye, 2012, etc.). What do you do when, in a waking dream--or, better, a dream from which waking seems impossible--you have to defend yourself from a spectral figure that's flitting through your pad? If you're one of Evenson's characters, you might not have the resources or the will to keep a gun handy. And what good would a gun do against a ghost, anyway? So you grab, naturally, a book, "the largest and heaviest one in the stack," and hope for the best. But does that shadowy, scary figure even exist? There's the question. So it is that in one story in this collection, "Click," its very title filled with ominous portent, the protagonist is suffering brain trauma and cannot remember something most terrible that he has done. But is he really damaged or just crazy or just imagining it all? Evenson leaves the reader guessing so that we're not sure whether to be relieved or alarmed when the doctor gets ready to drill holes for the steel plate in the skull. Drills and other such tools are things to be worried about, of course, as are Evenson's foreshadowings: when a character begins remembering how his dad deftly slaughtered a pig--"You pull the bastard up and hold it and don't pay no mind to how it struggles"--then you know that nothing good can come of it. Evenson's stories, small masterworks of literary horror, are elegantly tense. They operate in psychological territory, never relying on grossness or slasher silliness to convey their scariness; they're more like the Japanese horror of Pulse than the sanguinary adventures of Freddy Krueger, though they have the same watch-between-the-fingers quality. For the Stephen King fan in the house: an author as capable, if a touch less prolific.

        COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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A stuffed bear's heart beats with the rhythm of a dead baby, Reno keeps receding to the east no matter how far you drive, and in a mine on another planet, the dust won't stop seeping in. In these stories, Evenson unsettles us with the everyday and the extraordinary—the terror of living with the knowledge of all we cannot know.
Praise for Brian Evenson:
"Brian Evenson is one of the treasures of American story writing, a true successor both to the generation of Coover, Barthelme, Hawkes and Co., but also to Edgar Allan Poe."—Jonathan Lethem
"One of the most provocative, inventive, and talented writers we have working today." The Believer
"There is not a more intense, prolific, or apocalyptic writer of fiction in America than Brian Evenson." —George Saunders
“Brian Evenson is one of the few who will still be read a hundred years from now: either by our grandchildren, or by the machines who have killed our...
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tableOfContents

Maternity
And Yet
Black Bark
A Report
The Punish
A Collapse of Horses
Three Indignities
Cult
Hospice
The Dust
BearHeart
Scour
Torpor
Past Reno
The Moans
The Window
Lost Dog
Click
The Blood Drip

bisacCodes
      • code: FIC019000
      • description: Fiction / Literary
      • code: FIC025000
      • description: Fiction / Psychological
      • code: FIC029000
      • description: Fiction / Short Stories (single author)