Alyson Hagy

A haunting, evocative tale about the power of storytelling A brutal civil war has ravaged the country, and contagious fevers have decimated the population. Abandoned farmhouses litter the isolated mountain valleys and shady hollows. The economy has been reduced to barter and trade. In this craggy, unwelcoming world, the central character of Scribe ekes out a lonely living on the family farmstead where she was raised and where her sister met an untimely end. She lets a migrant group known as the Uninvited set up temporary camps on her land, and maintains an uneasy peace with her cagey neighbors and the local enforcer. She has learned how to make paper and ink, and she has become known for her letter-writing skills, which she exchanges for tobacco, firewood, and other scarce resources. An unusual request for a letter from a man with hidden motivations unleashes the ghosts of her troubled past and sets off a series of increasingly calamitous events that culminate in a harrowing journey to a crossroads. Drawing on traditional folktales and the history and culture of Appalachia, Alyson Hagy has crafted a gripping, swiftly plotted novel that touches on pressing issues of our time—migration, pandemic disease, the rise of authoritarianism—and makes a compelling case for the power of stories to both show us the world and transform it.

A Novel

Scribe

After a grueling tour of duty in Korea, two men return to the Wyoming ranch on which they grew up, both marked in dangerous ways, in a novel that reveals the intricacies of a profound friendship between two very different men.

Snow, Ashes

An unsentimental vision of the west, new and old, comes to life in a gritty new collection of stories by the author of Snow, Ashes In Ghosts of Wyoming, Alyson Hagy explores the hardscrabble lives and terrain of America's least-populous state. Beyond the tourist destinations of Jackson Hole and Yellowstone lies a less familiar and wilder frontier defined by the tension wrought by abundance and scarcity. A young runaway with a big secret slips across the state border and steals a collie pup from the Meeker County fairgrounds. A chorus of trainmen details a day spent laying rail across the Wyoming Territory, while contemporary voices describe life in the oil and gas fields near Gillette. A traveling preacher is caught up in a deadly skirmish between cattle rustlers and ranchers on his way from Rawlins to the Indian reservation on the Popo Agie River. Locals and activists clash when a tourist makes an archaeological discovery near Hoodoo Mountain. With spirited, lyrical prose, Hagy expertly weaves together Wyoming's colorful pioneer and speculator history with the notoften- heard voices of petroleum workers, thrill-seeking rock climbers, and those left behind by the latest boom and bust.

Stories

Ghosts of Wyoming

An unforgettable story of men and horses, the American West, and the dream of a ticket out * A May 2012 Indie Next Pick * Will Testerman is a young Wyoming horse trainer determined to make something of himself. Money is tight at the family ranch, where he's living again after a disastrous end to his job on the Texas show-horse circuit. He sees his chance with a beautiful quarter horse, a filly that might earn him a reputation, and spends his savings to buy her. Armed with stories and the confidence of youth, he devotes himself to her training -- first, in the familiar barns and corrals of home, then on a guest ranch in the rugged Absaroka mountains, and, in the final trial, on the glittering, treacherous polo fields of southern California. With Boleto, Alyson Hagy delivers a masterfully told, exquisitely observed novel about our intimate relationships with animals and money, against the backdrop of a new West that is changing forever.

Boleto

Sorcière pour les uns, sainte pour les autres, elle seule sait encore lire, écrire, fabriquer de l’encre et du papier, et on vient de loin pour obtenir d’elle une lettre. Dans une Amérique balayée par d’étranges fièvres, des hordes de mercenaires et les Indésirables, elle a su garder sa ferme, fidèle à la mémoire de sa sœur. Mais l’arrivée de Mr Hendricks met fin à ce fragile équilibre. Son étrange magnétisme libère en elle tous les fantômes, l’entraînant dans un voyage bien au-delà de la rivière de Blackwater, sur les terres du tout-puissant Billy Kingery... Les Sœurs de Blackwater est une ode magistrale et envoûtante au pouvoir des mots – seule arme et seul remède dans le monde dystopique d’Alyson Hagy.

Les Sœurs de Blackwater

“Hagy’s writing and characters are worth getting to know.”—The New York Times Book Review Life on the Outer Banks of North Carolina is filled with contradictions: a wildness of spirit alongside astonishing beauty, while the encroaching sea continues to take its toll. In Graveyard of the Atlantic, first published in 2000, Alyson Hagy explores the lives of those who persist at the eroding edge of a landscape that is as harsh and glorious as any human heart. “Alyson Hagy’s stories have grit and the tang of seawater—and they sound like no one else’s. They are about men and women who live alongside great bodies of water and who are in the grip of great forces of nature, transfixed by them. These stories pulse and burn, like a rope traveling rapidly through your hands.”—Charles Baxter “You can hear the surf and smell the cut bait. And you can enter the lives of a host of colorful characters, each expressing his or her own kind of longing as well as a connection to this lush place. . . . This collection is a prize.”—Jill McCorkle “Strong, polished stories. . . . Hagy’s spare prose and flinty dialogue vividly conjures the ocean-sprayed atmosphere of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. . . . Honest work from a thoughtful craftswoman.”—Kirkus Reviews

Graveyard of the Atlantic

Adams breathed through the thick weave of his pulse. Hobbs. Again. His return likely meant trouble. Care and trouble. The uneasy friendship between Fremont Adams and C. D. Hobbs worked best when both men had a job to do, when they could fall into the rhythm of hard labor. Neglected by his mother at an early age, Hobbs found his way into the Adams family. But everyone could tell he was always a bit off. Fremont resigned himself to watching out for Hobbs, who had the innocence and optimism that can come only from ignorance. After a grueling tour of duty in Korea, however, Adams and Hobbs return to the ranch marked in dangerous ways. In four parts—alternating between the Wyoming ranch and Korea—Alyson Hagy reveals the intricacies of a profound friendship between two very different men. Snow, Ashes is a suspenseful, engaging exploration of survival and failure and of how the most vulnerable among us can have a wisdom beyond measure.

From award-winning writer Alyson Hagy comes a novel set at Kentucky's Keeneland racetrack, where the horses run for glory and people stake love and money -- all to win at the sport of kings. Hagy, a compelling storyteller who has the "same way with language as her characters have with animals" (San Jose Mercury News), introduces Kerry Connelly, a skilled exercise rider who hasn't yet learned that liking a horse doesn't make it faster but loving one means genuine risk. Kerry -- who can hardly remember a day she hasn't put sweat in the saddle -- is more or less healthy, more or less single, and technically broke. She's come back to home turf, the sweet Kentucky bluegrass of Keeneland, one step ahead of her estranged husband, Eric. A trainer fueled by drugs and money dreams, he's got control of Kerry's champion mare, Sunsquall, and has New York loan sharks after them all. Keeneland may not be much of a haven, as Kerry's shadowy past has not been forgotten. Some people on the backside of the track are too proud to take her back without a fight -- Alice Piersall, the massive, hell-for-leather trainer of second-rate horses; Reno, a one-time child preacher who now saves his brimstone sermons for the Thoroughbreds; and Billy, a former lover known for his honesty in a roulette wheel business. Others are determined to make her fall -- bottle-blond Louisa Fett, a rider who has hated Kerry since they trained together as teens; Delvecchio, a showboat trainer who treats his barn girls like stock. Gossip, gambling, lust, and outright robbery erode Kerry's dwindling fortunes. When Eric returns to make his play, risking Sunsquall to clear his debts, Kerry must find out if her final cards -- her body and soul -- are enough to save her in this world where little lasts for long except hope. Keeneland, as Hagy tells it, in a haunting voice "as unique and natural as folk art" (The Orlando Sentinel), energizes -- and humanizes -- the carnival chaos of racetrack life.

Alyson Hagy

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