Shoot the Horses First - Softcover

Angstman, Leah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1734306599 ISBN 13: 9781734306590

Publisher: Kernpunkt Press, 2023

Synopsis

***Winner of the Shorts Award for Americana Fiction***
Through a historian’s lens and folkloric storytelling, the pieces in SHOOT THE HORSES FIRST revel in the nuances, brutality, mythology, and tiny victories of our historical past. A launderer takes us inside the linens of the richest families in early Baltimore. A child on the Orphan Train has his teeth inspected like a horse. Civil War soldiers experience PTSD. While one woman lands on an island of the Wampanoag tribe, a woman 200 years later finds Apache in a harsh frontier. Children survive yellow fever, the desert heat, and mistaken identities; men survive severed fingers, untested medicines, and wives with obsessive compulsive disorders. Frederick Douglass’ grandson plays violin at the World’s Fair on Colored American Day, a woman with disabilities is kept hidden away like she doesn’t exist, and a botanist is denied her place in a science journal because she is female. Themes of place, war, mental illness, identity, disability, feminism, and unyielding optimism throughout harrowing desperation resurface in this collection of stories that takes us back to time immemorial, yet feels so close, and all too familiar.

About this title

About the Author

Leah Angstman is the author of the historical novel of 17th-century New England, OUT FRONT THE FOLLOWING SEA (Regal House, 2022), the novel of the French Revolution, FALCON IN THE DIVE (Regal House, 2024), and the collection of short histories, SHOOT THE HORSES FIRST (Kernpunkt, 2023). She serves as executive editor for Alternating Current Press and The Coil online magazine, and her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Publishers Weekly, Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and The Nashville Review. She's recently been the winner of the Shorts Award for Americana Fiction and a finalist for the Colorado Independent Publishers Association Book Awards, Laramie Book Award, Chaucer Book Award, Eric Hoffer Book Award, National Indie Excellence Award, Da Vinci Eye Award, Clue Book Award, Richard Snyder Memorial Prize, Cowles Book Prize, and Able Muse Book Award; a semifinalist for the Goethe Book Award; and longlisted for the Hillary Gravendyk Prize. Leah serves as an appointed government-advisory vice chair of a Colorado historical commission and an appointed liaison to a Colorado historic preservation government-advisory committee. You can find her online at leahangstman.com and on social media as @leahangstman.

Edition details

• Publisher: Kernpunkt Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1734306599
• ISBN 13: 9781734306590
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 238