Laughing in the Hills ― A Season at the Racetrack

Bill Barich burst onto the literary scene more than twenty-five years ago with this remarkable account of racetrack life. Holed up in a cheap motel in Albany, California, only a few miles from Golden Gate Fields, he looked to the track to help him make sense of his life during a dark peiod of loss and challenge. With rare sensitivity, he captured the gritty world of the backstretch, and also its poetry, as few other writers have done. Laughing in the Hills, which was first serialized in the New Yorker, has become a classic of sporting literature and a must for anyone who loves horses and the world they create.

It is a lovely, valuable book, introspective without being self-servingly so, affectionate but never saccharine in its evocation of racetrack life, witty and perceptive throughout.” Jonathan Yardley,Sports Illustrated

Bill Barich is the author of numerous books, among them Big Dreams: Into the Heart of California, andThe Sporting Life. He has written extensively for The New Yorker, as well asPlayboy and Sports Illustrated. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow in fiction.