The Horse Latitudes, written by The Gravity of the Thing‘s co-editor Matthew Robinson, is a 2018 Oregon Book Awards Finalist for the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction. A very warm congratulations!
The Horse Latitudes follows one Cavalry platoon’s time in Baghdad, Iraq. The missions are long stretches of boredom broken by flashes of violence. The single sniper shot fired. An IED loosely buried in the roadside, waiting. A schoolyard of kids throwing fist-sized rocks at gun trucks. The enemy is vast and changing, and the downtime is a combination of homesickness, RPGs, and mortar fire. These men suffer through the war, heat, and each other. The Horse Latitudes observes not only the firefights and their aftermath, but also the soldiers’ struggles within themselves: how to fight a faceless enemy, what it means to serve, how one soldiers, what makes a man, what makes a good man, what it might mean to die for this, and what it might mean not to.
Matthew Robinson writes fiction, creative nonfiction, and personal essays. He holds an MFA from Portland State University, where he also teaches writing. The recipient of a 2016 Oregon Literary Fellowship, his fiction has been published in O-Dark-Thirty, Nailed Magazine, Gobshite Quarterly, Split Lip Magazine, and Clackamas Literary Review. He served six years in the Oregon Army National Guard, deploying to Baghdad, Iraq, in 2004. The Horse Latitudes is his first book.
To learn more or purchase The Horse Latitudes, please click here to be redirected to Propeller Books.