"Heroines on Horseback looks at the pony book through its beginnings in the 20s and 30s, to the glory days of the 40s and 50s, and beyond. Pony book expert Jane Badger writes about the lives and contributions of noted exponents, including Primrose Cumming, Monica Edwards, Patricia Leitch, Ruby Ferguson and the Pullein-Thompson sisters, as well as providing a wide-ranging view of the genre as a whole, its themes and developments, illustrators and short stories."--Lower cover.

Abby Lovitt is put in charge of training the expensive and haughty horse Pie in the Sky after his owner refuses. While trying to get a hold on him, she must deal with the new challenges, both good and bad, that come with being a freshman in high school in 1970's Northern California.

(The Girl Who Loves Horses was previously published under the title Fiel.)Shoveling manure – no sweat. Working with a rude stable boy – can deal with it. Teased, humiliated and snubbed, thirteen-year-old Sierra Landsing endures all for the chance to learn to ride and to be around horses. River Girard, the stable boy, loves the horses as much as Sierra. He treats each horse with kindness and respect and surprisingly, as friendship develops between Sierra and River, she feels he treats her the same way as the horses. An amazingly gifted rider, River teaches Sierra a style of riding that she loves. But River doesn't compete, and when Sierra starts taking lessons from a professional and is confronted with harsh training methods, she is torn between doing what she thinks is right, or looking the other way in order to pursue her dream of competing in the Pacific Regional Combined Training Championship.

A girl who longs for her own horse is given the chance to care for a troubled, damaged horse, who needs her as much as she needs him. Fourteen-year-old Jane Ryan has always dreamed of having a horse of her own—but so long as she gets to ride her favorite school horse, Beau, at Sunny Acres farm, she's content. And this is the summer she means to try out for the advanced riding class. But just as camp begins, Jane receives heartbreaking news about Beau. She loses, not just her favorite horse, but also her chance to ride in the end-of-summer competition. When her trainer asks for her help with an out-of-control chestnut warmblood, Lancelot, a newcomer to the barn, she has no choice but to say yes. There's another new addition to the farm: Ben Reyes, the grandson of the barn's manager. As Jane struggles to go on without Beau, and to make Lancelot the great horse she believes him to be, her feelings for Ben, her relationships with the privileged group of girls she rides with, and her painful, joyous road to self-discovery all lead to a heart-pounding conclusion that is truly a new beginning. Only Jane's faith in Lancelot, and her own rediscovered skill and strength, can see her through the hard journey toward a horse of her own.

Horse Crazy explores the meaning behind the love between girls and horses. Jean O'Malley Halley, a self-professed "horse girl," contends that this relationship and its cultural signifiers influence the manner in which young girls define their identity when it comes to gender. Halley examines how popular culture, including the "pony book" genre, uses horses to encourage conformity to gender norms but also insists that the loving relationship between a girl and a horse fundamentally challenges sexist and mainstream ideas of girlhood. Horse Crazy looks at the relationships between girls and horses through the frameworks of Michel Foucault's concepts of normalization and biopower, drawing conclusions about the way girls' agency is both normalized and resistant to normalization. Segments of Halley's own experiences with horses as a young girl, as well as experiences from the perspective of other girls, are sources for examination. "Horsey girls," as she calls them, are girls who find a way to defy the expectations given to them by society-thinness, obsession with makeup and beauty, frailty-and gain the possibility of freedom in the process. Drawing on Nicole Shukin's uses of animal capital theories, Halley also explores the varied treatment of horses themselves as an example of the biopolitical use of nonhuman animals and the manipulation and exploitation of horse life. In so doing she engages with common ways we think and feel about animals and with the technologies of speciesism.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning and best-selling author: a captivating, brilliantly imaginative story of three extraordinary animals—and a young boy—whose lives intersect in Paris in this "feel-good escape” (The New York Times). Paras, short for "Perestroika," is a spirited racehorse at a racetrack west of Paris. One afternoon at dusk, she finds the door of her stall open and—she's a curious filly—wanders all the way to the City of Light. She's dazzled and often mystified by the sights, sounds, and smells around her, but she isn't afraid. Soon she meets an elegant dog, a German shorthaired pointer named Frida, who knows how to get by without attracting the attention of suspicious Parisians. Paras and Frida coexist for a time in the city's lush green spaces, nourished by Frida's strategic trips to the vegetable market. They keep company with two irrepressible ducks and an opinionated raven. But then Paras meets a human boy, Etienne, and discovers a new, otherworldly part of Paris: the ivy-walled house where the boy and his nearly-one-hundred-year-old great-grandmother live in seclusion. As the cold weather nears, the unlikeliest of friendships bloom. But how long can a runaway horse stay undiscovered in Paris? How long can a boy keep her hidden and all to himself? Jane Smiley's beguiling new novel is itself an adventure that celebrates curiosity, ingenuity, and the desire of all creatures for true love and freedom.

"This story, if it is one, deserves the closure of a suicide, perhaps even the magisterial finality of what is usually called a novel, but the remnants of that faraway time offer nothing more than a taste of damp ashes, a feeling of indeterminacy, and the obdurate inconclusiveness of passing time." So writes the unnamed narrator of Horse Crazy, looking back on a season of madness and desire. The first novel from the brilliant, protean Gary Indiana, Horse Crazy tells the story of a thirty-five-year-old writer for a New York arts and culture magazine whose life melts into a fever dream when he falls in love with the handsome, charming, possibly heroin-addicted, and almost certainly insane Gregory Burgess. In the derelict brownstones of the Lower East Side in the late eighties, among the coked out restauranteurs and art world impresarios of the supposed "downtown scene," the narrator wanders through the fog of passion. Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic is spreading through the city, and New York friendships sputter to an end. Here is a novel where the only moral is that thwarted passion is the truest passion, where love is a hallucination and the gravest illness is desire.