Kathryn Scanlan's Kick the Latch vividly captures the arc of one woman's life at the racetrack-the flat land and ramshackle backstretch; the bad feelings and friction; the winner's circle and the racetrack bar; the fancy suits and fancy boots; and the "particular language" of "grooms, jockeys, trainers, racing secretaries, stewards, pony people, hotwalkers, everybody"-with economy and integrity. Based on transcribed interviews with Sonia, a horse trainer, the novel investigates form and authenticity in a feat of synthesis reminiscent of Charles Reznikoff's Testimony. As Scanlan puts it, "I wanted to preserve-amplify, exaggerate-Sonia's idiosyncratic speech, her bluntness, her flair as a storyteller. I arrived at what you could call a composite portrait of a self." Whittled down with a fiercely singular artistry, Kick the Latch bangs out of the starting gate and carries the reader on a careening joyride around the inside track.

‘Unusual, finely judged and wrought work… has reminded us of the beauty that can be discovered in the ordinary and in ordinary speech.’ -- Lydia Davis on AUG 9—FOG

A collection of innovative and ambitious short stories from a visionary young writer

In The Dominant Animal – Kathryn Scanlan’s adventurous, unsettling debut collection – compression is key. Sentences have been relentlessly trimmed, tuned and teased for maximum impact. A ferocious attention to rhythm and sound results in a palpable pulse of excitability and distress.

In these forty very short stories, the ordinary shifts into the uncanny: in living rooms and in hotel rooms, on suburban lawns and on the surgeon’s chair, characters – human and animal – eat, breathe, provoke and injure one another. Grandmothers sit tethered to the couch in a blue spell, lonesome men crouch among thorny shrubs, pets expire slowly or suddenly, and the nature of love is questioned at a golf course, a flower shop, an all-you-can-eat buffet.

With exquisite control, Scanlan moves from expansive moods and fine afternoons to unease and violence. Disturbances accrue as the collection progresses. No mercy, a character says – and these stories are merciless and strange and absolutely masterful.