It is 1987 in New Yorks East Village. AIDS is devastating the intersecting worlds of drag queens, artists, and club kids. Lyssa, a young lesbian is working the phones at the AIDS Hotline, trying to find herself and some comfort amidst the chaos of the growing crisis. When she enters into a relationship with Simone, the woman of her dreams, she finds the sexual freedom shes been searching for, but her insecurities quickly take over. Soon, Lyssa is in a complicated relationship with Kevin, a recovering heroin addict, and her world implodes against the backdrop of sexual politics and personal tragedy. "Late 1980s New York in all its AIDS-fighting, boot-stomping, pizza-scarfing, heart-breaking, alt-angle glory comes fizzing and crackling to life in Michelle Auerbachs marvelous new novel The Third Kind of Horse. Auerbach is that rare, fierce writer who emphatically knows the world whereof she writes both in and out of the marvelous sentences she uses to explore/explode it. There are deep pleasures to be had here and they are not few.

" Laird Hunt, author of The Kind One and The Impossibly.