REBECCA CLARREN reads from her debut novel KICKDOWN with KEN BENSINGER

Kickdown (Skyhorse Publishing)

When Jackie Dunbar's father dies, she takes a leave from medical school and goes back to the family cattle ranch in Colorado to set affairs in order. But what she finds derails her: the Dunbar ranch is bankrupt, her sister is having a nervous breakdown, and the oil and gas industry has changed the landscape of this small western town both literally and figuratively, tempting her to sell a gas lease to save the family land.

There is fencing to be repaired and calves to be born, and no one--except Jackie herself--to take control. But then a gas well explodes in the neighboring ranch, and the fallout sets off a chain of events that will strain trust, sever old relationships, and ignite new ones.

Rebecca Clarren's Kickdown is a tautly written debut novel about two sisters and the Iraq war veteran who steps in to help. It is a timeless and timely meditation on the grief wrought by death, war, and environmental destruction. Kickdown, like Kent Haruf's Plainsong or Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone, weaves together the threads of land, family, failure, and perseverance to create a gritty tale about rural America.

Praise for Kickdown

"Kickdown is an important, urgent novel. It’s about ecological destruction, but it’s also about resistance, compassion, and love. Rebecca Clarren vividly depicts the beauty and the toughness of the American West in this timely, extraordinary debut.”— Carter Sickels, author of The Evening Hour, winner of the Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award and finalist for the Oregon Book Award.

“Becca Clarren's book is deep, true, achingly pure, as stripped of glamor and pretense as the beautiful desolation it describes. With an unflinching eye for the unsettling political and environmental issues of our time, Clarren captures perfectly the heartland of our country and the hearts of those whose old answers have suddenly failed them--they are all strangers to themselves, full of wonder and worry, wild impulses, inarticulate feelings. Kickdown is what life sounds like when we give up the search for who we thought we were supposed to be, and begin the search for our own true humanity.”— Karen Fisher, author of A Sudden Country

“Exquisitely written, Rebecca Clarren’s novel reminds you of the power of fiction — the way it can engage with contemporary politics, and still remain, at its heart, an imaginative art form. The prose is beautiful; the ideas are unflinching; the narrative throughline will propel you forward unstoppably. Clarren’s great talent, though, is engagement with character. You care about these people and, through caring, you are transformed. A brilliant book.”— Pauls Toutonghi, author of Evel Knievel Days and Dog, Gone

"Because of aridity, because of 500,000 square miles of federal land, the West is eternal. What changes are its villains and good guys. Rebecca Clarren’s Kickdown is a worthy companion to our best Western novels. Its characters live and breathe, and the land and their work on the land remain at the center of this fine first novel. Most impressive are Clarren's descriptions of the unrelenting work that makes western ranches the most beautiful of man-made landscapes."— Ed Marston, former publisher, High Country News

Award-winning journalist Rebecca Clarren has been writing about the rural West for nearly twenty years. Her journalism, for which she has won the Hillman Prize, an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, and nine grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, has appeared in such publications as MotherJones, High Country News, The Nation, and Salon.com. Her first novel, Kickdown (Sky Horse Press, 2018), was shortlisted for the PEN/Bellwether Prize. She lives in Portland, Ore. with her husband and two young sons.

Photo by Shelby Brakken

Ken Bensinger is the author of Red Card: How the U.S. Blew the Whistle on the World's Biggest Sports Scandal. He has been a journalist for more than twenty years, working at The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and, since 2014, for BuzzFeed News, as a member of its investigations team. Bensinger  has written about sports, labor, art, automobiles, and politics, among other topics, and has won the ASME National Magazine Award and the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Finance & Business Reporting, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in national reporting. He grew up in Seattle and lives with his wife, two children, and dog, in Los Angeles.