Hello and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club.

I'm Megan O'Rourke, a culture critic for Slate.

And joining me today are Michael Agger, a Slate editor.

Welcome, Michael.

Welcome, hi.

And Troy Patterson, Slate's TV critic.

Welcome, Troy.

Hey, Megan.

So today we are discussing the quote-unquote dark horse

winner of the National Book Award, Lord of Misrule, a novel by Jamie Gordon. And we're joking here

about this quote-unquote dark horse runner because the book is, it's about horses. It's about race horses,

among other things. it's sat at a

a seedy race track indian mound downs which is down river from wheeling west virginia and there are a lot of

things we can say about this book one of the things i think we could say right away is that it's it's

very much a book that's portraying a microcosm. It's a deep look at a small world. And it raises a lot of interesting questions about style and plot and other things. We probably, you know, we were just talking about the fact that we probably wouldn't have been doing this book had it not won the National Book Award because it didn't sell very many copies. It was published by a small press and I had escaped our notice thus far before the

award. But there's a lot we should say. I think it escaped everyone's notice. It escaped everyone's

notice, not just ours. I think except for trade publications, it didn't get reviewed anywhere until

after it was nominated for the award.

Yes.

At which point it received a favorable notice from Jane Smiley in the Washington Post and

a good write-up in the Daily Racing Form.

Oh, I'm surprised I miss that, since I do like to check the Daily and Racing Form out.

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