Leonardo's Horse

by R.M. Berry

On May 2, 1519 at the Clos Luc in Amboise, Leonardo is dying. He no longer cares about art or science. He wants only to answer a simple question about his life: why did he abandon his colossal equestrian statue in Milan? Meanwhile, R-, a 20th century historian writing a novel about Leonardo, meditates upon the same question in the midst of an apocalyptic traffic jam, as military helicopters fill the air with tear gas, AIDS demonstrators run amok, and a hospital evacuates its patients onto a nearby sidewalk. Berry's stupendous novel is a fitting response to the close of a century obsessed with the "end of history." This book is a big masterpiece of a kind rarely dared in the contemporary novel.

317 pages, Paperback

First published November 17, 1997

About the author

Ralph M. Berry, Professor, Ph.D., MFA Iowa (1985), specializes in twentieth century literature, critical theory, and creative writing (fiction). In 1985, he served as a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Tours in France. R. M. Berry is the author of the novels Frank (2005), "an unwriting of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," and Leonardo's Horse, a New York Times "notable book" of 1998. His first collection of short fictions, Plane Geometry and Other Affairs of the Heart, was chosen by Robert Coover as winner of the 1985 Fiction Collective prize, and his second, Dictionary of Modern Anguish (2000), was described by the Buffalo News as "a collection of widely disparate narratives inspired...by the spirit of Ludwig Wittgenstein." Berry's essays on experimental fiction and philosophy have appeared in Symploke, Narrative, Philosophy and Literature, Soundings, American Book Review, Context, and numerous critical anthologies. With Jeffrey Di Leo he has edited the essay collection, Fiction's Present: Situating Narrative Innovation, (SUNY Press: 2007). From 1999 through 2007 he was publisher of Fiction Collective Two. He is currently chair of the English Department of Florida