Kai Maristed

"The prose is stupendous as Maristed's entangled layers of plot allow a look at modern Berlin through the eyes of its turbulent past." --Michael Spinella, Booklist

"These are spirited, unusual stories, dark with obsession and rich in character: a pleasure to read." --Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever and Other Stories, winner of the National Book Award

"...if winning a reader's complicity is a writer's biggest obstacle, Maristed clears it with style."
-- The New York Times Book Review, Sally Eckhoff

"The common presence of horses (blue-dappled and porcelain, randy, imaginary and fleet) links the nine stories in this haunting, sad, indelible collection. In the eerie "Blue Horse," a kidnapped girl speaks with disarming simplicity of her imprisonment in a man's rank, food-stained apartment, and of her truck-stop prostitution, her alienation from her pious family and the love, disgust and terror she comes to feel for her captor.... Finally, the success of these impeccable stories rests on the connection between humans and horses, on sympathy between species that speaks of what is brutish and gentle in all of us." -- Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"Kai Maristed is a stunning writer: Reading her, you feel absolutely gripped. In Fall, an unsparing glimpse of the tough, gritty world behind the glamour of the horse show, she creates characters so real that you practically hear them draw breath. I'll be a hopelessly addicted Maristed fan forever." --X. J. Kennedy

"This story of a brother and sister, abandoned in childhood and determined to survive in an inchoate and unfeeling world, makes fascinating reading. The author's voice marks her as an original." --Ann Bernays