I posted it earlier, but his essay about going on a cruise, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" is just amazing. It's also the title of a wonderful collection of non fiction essays about topics ranging from lobster festivals to professional tennis to state fairs.
I probably wouldn't recommend his fiction unless you're into really weird, dense shit.
Here's the entirety of "
Ticket to the Fair." I'll paste an excerpt below as well:
Quote:
The livestock venues are at full occupancy animalwise, but we seem to be the only fairgoing tourists from the ceremony who've dashed right over to tour them. You can tell which barns are for which animals with your eyes closed. The horses are in their own individual stalls,with half-height doors and owners and grooms on stools by the doors, a lot of them dozing. The horses stand in hay. Billy Ray Cyrus plays loudly on some stableboy's boom box. The horses have tight hides and apple-sized eyes that are set on the sides of their heads, like fish. I've rarely been this close to fine livestock. The horses' faces are long and somehow suggestive of coffins. The racers are lanky, velvet over bone. The draft and show horses are mammoth and spotlessly groomed, and more or less odorless:the acrid smell in here is just the horses pee: All their muscles are beautiful;the hides enhance them. They make farty noises when they sigh, heads hanging over the short doors. They're not for petting, though. When you come close they flatten their ears and show big teeth. The grooms laugh to themselves as we jump back. These are special competitive horses, with intricately bred high-strung artistic temperaments. I wish I'd brought carrots. Animals can be bought, emotionally. Stall after stall of horses. Standard horse-type colors.They eat the same hay they stand in. Occasional feedbags look like gas masks. A sudden clattering spray-sound like somebody hosing down siding turns out to be a glossy dun stallion peeing. He's at the back of his stall getting combed, and the door is wide open.The stream of pee is an inch in diameter and
throws up dust and hay and it looks like even chips of wood from the floor.A stallion is a male horse.We hunker down and have a look upward, and suddenly for the first time I understand a certain expression describing certain human males, an expression I'd heard but never quite understood till now.
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