About one woman’s fine, hard life at the racetrack, Kick the Latch–with its ruthless concision and artful mysteries–is lightning in a bottleKathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch vividly captures the arc of one woman’s life at the racetrack—the flat land and ramshackle backstretch; the bad feelings and friction; the winner’s circle and the racetrack bar; the fancy suits and fancy boots; and the “particular language” of “grooms, jockeys, trainers, racing...

Majestic Speedlube is a novel with its boot on the gas—a cacophonous vision of the USA as seen from the cab of a hard-working compact white pick-up truck.Kathryn Scanlan’s Majestic Speedlube follows Happy and Early, couriers eking out a living driving unshippable objects—a taxidermied bear, a two-hundred pound crystal, a custom tombstone—across the country in their “club-cab bed-capped” rig. The resulting linguistic joy ride, powered by Scanlan’s ...