Pale Horse, Pale Rider
Edition: New Ed edition
Publisher: Modern Library
Published: June 30, 1998
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 205
ISBN-13: 9780679603030
Subjects: Modern fiction; Porter, Katherine Anne, 1890-1980; Fiction; Literature - Classics / Criticism; Literature: Classics; Classics; Fiction / General
First sentence: She was a spirited-looking young woman, with dark curly hair cropped and parted on the side, a short oval face with straight eyebrows, and a large curved mouth.
Description: Pale Horse, Pale Rider comprises three of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's short novels or long stories, as Porter - who didn't hold with the term "novella" - called her pieces. In the masterly "Noon Wine," set on a Texas farm circa 1900, she offers an unforgettable study of evil.

According to Reynolds Price the tale "can stand shoulder to shoulder with anything in Tolstoy or Chekhov." Both "Old Mortality" and the title story center on Porter's fictional counterpart, Miranda: a resilient Southern heroine who, as Mary Gordon observed, is in "the precarious position of a woman who must earn her way with no one behind her to break fall."
Notes: Modern Library