The Lover of Horses and Other Stories Author:Tess Gallagher Some storytellers are literary magicians who can capture a situation and spin it out, remembering details like pink hair curlers or the smell of the dark space under a back porch. They take the everyday and invest it with significance and life. Reading the stories in The Lover of Horses is like sitting at the feet of a kind, knowing woman whose ... more »hands are endlessly full of yarn, knitting something fantastic out of what is, after all, sheep hair. One story shows what happens when you bring together a woman, her Avon lady, and a fortune teller. Then there is the wife who comes to understand the worth of her short, balding husband; a widow who realizes what her loveless marriage meant to her and to her husband; the daughter who comes home to her dying father. Tess Gallagher shows us people reaching across small and large spaces, bouncing off each other, meeting for moments, or living together for years. Through her stories they become fascinating and beautiful, as full of depth and texture as plain cotton cloth when viewed through a microscope.« less