scribe: a novel

A haunting, evocative tale about the power of storytelling

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.

Boleto: A Novel

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.

To produce a novel as stirring and austerely beautiful as Boleto, a writer must be fluent in the languages of horses, of men, and of the American West. Alyson Hagy has command of all three, and she uses them to masterful effect in these pages.”
― Larry Watson

Good stories teach us how to read them, and the opening pages of Boleto are entertaining, entrancing teachers. . . . Hagy often dazzles with her descriptions of the Wyoming landscape and wildlife. Whether it’s the corral of the Testerman ranch, the rugged passes of the Black Bell Ranch or the depressed outskirts of Anaheim, the settings glimmer with well-chosen metaphors.”
― The New York Times Book Review

In her gift for the language of horses, as in the beauty of her prose, Hagy will inevitably recall Annie Proulx, Kent Haruf and Cormac McCarthy. But she is writing as much about wealth and class, about work and privilege, as about horses and the Western landscape.”
― Washington Post

Ghosts of Wyoming: Stories

An unsentimental vision of the west, new and old, comes to life in a gritty new collection of stories

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.

Sharp, mournful tales and dead-on yarns. Hagy knows Wyoming well, her stern weathers and defiant beauty and patient ruthlessness. She knows too how this land fashions and tests her ghosts, both living and long gone.”
― Joy Williams

These eight burnished stories confirm Alyson Hagy’s importance in American literature; her seamless blending of landscape and lives, her very modern understanding of the vulnerability of kindness.”
― Los Angeles Times

Snow, Ashes: A Novel

This novel is tough, tight, surprisingly lyrical at just the right moments, and damn near emotionally lethal…. Somehow, from the stark beauty of the Wyoming landscape, the leathery souls who inhabit it, and the freezing madness of combat in the Korean War, Hagy conjures a vision of rarefied beauty.”
― Brad Watson

Childhood friends return from the Korean War differently damaged in Hagy’s moving and stark fifth work of fiction…. Hagy crafts first-rate prose—unsparingly raw and visceral with flashes of high lyricism—that carries the reader from the napalmed mountains of Korea to the vast pastures of the west. The inevitable but surprising conclusion will yank tears from hard hearts.”
― Publishers Weekly

Keeneland: A Novel

Hagy’s character Kerry is one of the most psychologically complex and realistic women in recent American literature. Increasingly hardened by experience, locked into a destructive pattern of wrong choices, and expecting little of others or herself, she gets out of the tough corners with an obdurate persistence that translates as survival, not only in the rough racetrack milieu but in contemporary American life and mores. Hagy is a writer on her way.”
― Annie Proulx

Kerry Connelly is a mess…. Smart, mouthy, and miserably ambivalent about the men in her world, she takes her lumps and then takes some more, all the while single-mindedly focused on retrieving her beloved thoroughbred, Sunny…. Critically acclaimed short-story writer Hagy draws the reader into the gritty, behind-the-scenes world of the racetrack with a vengeance. This is a hard novel to put down.”
― Library Journal

Graveyard of the Atlantic: Stories

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. Alyson Hagys stories explore 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…. [T]his collection is a prize.”
― Jill McCorkle

The stoic characters in Hagy’s third collection of short stories are intimately involved with the sea, but in their interpersonal relationships they tend to be as distant as ships passing in the night…. [T]he stark beauty of Hagy’s language is arresting, and the fleeting moments of emotional connection she engineers are infused with raw power.”
― Publisher’s Weekly

Hardware River: Stories

Alyson Hagy’s short stories combine some old Southern virtues with new graces all her own. Each seems to have been crafted with unutterable pains and patience, polished and honed to its finest edge. As disturbing as it is beautiful, Hardware River makes itself impossible to forget.”
― Madison Smartt Bell

In seven stories that limn the distances between wishes and realities, Hagy creates narratives that echo with a distinctly American voice…. [T]hese stories display an authenticity that goes well beyond the talented mimicry and impersonation of much first-person short fiction today. This accomplished collection should bring Hagy to the attention of those who value the art of fiction.”
― Publisher’s Weekly

Madonna On Her Back: Stories

Courage alone would make this collection at once surprising and altogether worthy; but, taken together with the writer’s graceful skill, it becomes a rare achievement…. [I]t is a pleasure to discover an artist who creates fiction of amplitude and resonance.”
― George Garrett

This first collection by a winner of the Hopwood Award for Short Fiction consists of eight finely crafted and intensely realized stories about people, often women alone or deprived, who must find outlets not only for their sexuality but also for their very being…. Hagy gives voice and texture to the passionate intensity with which often dreamy characters face the daily business of their lives.”
― Publisher’s Weekly