Slave Old Man Smiley Thakur Ellis moves deftly between historical

Ellis moves deftly between historical considerations of sports and thick descriptions of sport practitioner and spectator motivations

near the Wichita Mountains in what is now the southwestern part of the state of Oklahoma

the curmudgeonly Yankee

during the last seven years of his life

Slave Old Man Smiley Thakur Ellis moves deftly between historicalThe heart stopping (The Millions), richly layered (Brooklyn Rail), haunting, beautiful (BuzzFeed) story of an escaped captive and the killer hound that pursues him Slave Old Man is a cloudburst of a novel, swift and compressed but every page pulses, blood warm. . . . The prose is so electrifyingly synesthetic that, on more than one occasion, I found myself stopping to rub my eyes in disbelief. Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Shortlisted for the