C. E. MORGAN lives with her husband, Will Guild, in Berea, Kentucky. She is the author of All the Living.
"C.E. Morgan's The Sport of Kings takes the kind of dauntless,
breathtaking chances readers once routinely expected from the
boldest of American novels. . . . It is a profoundly orchestrated
work that is both timeless and up-to-the-minute in its concerns,
the most notable of which is what another Kentucky-bred novelist,
Robert Penn Warren, once labeled 'the awful responsibility of
time.'"--Judges' panel for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction "One of
this year's best novels."--The Boston Globe
"Magnificent."--GQ
"C.E. Morgan has more nerve, linguistic vitality, and commitment to
cosmic thoroughness in one joint of her little finger than the next
hundred contemporary novelists have in their entire bodies and
vocabularies."--The New York Times Book Review "C.E. Morgan tackles
destiny, race, love, and family with such thought-provoking,
stunning prose that even at its most disturbing, it's beautiful to
read. This book is destined to be an American classic. I haven't
read anything this powerful, moving, and jaw-dropping in many
years."--The San Diego Union-Tribune
"Ravishing and ambitious . . . [A] serious and important
novel."--The New York Times "[A]sprawling, magisterial Southern
Gothic for the twenty-first century."--O, The Oprah Magazine
"Majestic and sorrowful . . . With this extraordinary work, C.E.
Morgan moves into the front rank of contemporary
writers."--Newsday
"Everyone thinks [The Sport of Kings] is about horse racing, when
it's really about everything: love, race, legacy, family, justice,
poverty, and American inequality. On top of that, it's one of the
most gorgeous books I've read in many years. When I finished the
book, I immediately called a friend and said 'this book is
precisely why I do the work I do.'"--Lisa Lucas, executive director
of the National Book Foundation, for The Millions (A Year in
Reading) "A world-encompassing colossus of a second novel . . .
Constantly invigorating, surprising, and transfixing."--The Times
Literary Supplement
"[A]sweeping, ambitious novel . . . Spectacularly
well-written."--The Wall Street Journal "Remarkable achievements .
. . The Sport of Kings hovers between fiction, history, and myth,
its characters sometimes like the ancient ones bound to their tales
by fate, its horses distant kin to those who drew the chariot of
time across the sky . . . Novelists can do things that other
writers can't--and Morgan can do things that other novelists can't
. . . Tremendous, the work of a writer just starting to show us
what she can do."--The New Yorker "Vivid epic of rage and racism on
a Kentucky stud farm exposes the myth of the American dream."--The
Spectator (UK) "Spirited, fast and almost perfectly formed."--The
Times (UK) "With The Sport of Kings, C. E. Morgan has delivered a
masterpiece. Rich, deep, and ambitious, this book is, by any
standard, a Great American Novel."--Philipp Meyer, author of The
Son "[The Sport of Kings] is an epic novel steeped in American
history and geography . . . Morgan's gothic tale of Southern
decadence deepens into a searing investigation of racism's enduring
legacy . . . Vaultingly ambitious, thrillingly well-written,
charged with moral fervor and rueful compassion. How will this
dazzling writer astonish us next time?"--Kirkus Reviews (starred
review) "Morgan has dared to write the kind of book that was
presumed long extinct: a high literary epic of America."--The
Telegraph (UK) "Sport of Kings boasts a plot that maintains tension
and pace, and Morgan weaves its characters, its themes, its several
histories together in a marvelous display of literary control and
follow-through."--Christian Science Monitor "[A] rich and
compulsive new novel . . . This book confirms [Morgan] as the new
torchbearer of the Southern Gothic tradition. . . . What emerges is
a panoramic view of race relations in America, from the slow
crumbling of the Jim Crow laws until shortly before the election of
Barack Obama, with occasional glimpses into the more distant past.
Racing provides the novel's overarching metaphor for race (a set of
tracks that determine the course of a life, and for which the
correct breeding is essential), and Morgan's white characters are
hardly less constricted by history than her black ones. . . . It's
a bleak and bitter inversion of the American dream -- a world in
which circumstances are impossible to change, and legacies
impossible to shake."--The Financial Times
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