The Horse on the Sidewalk - stories by Baker Morrow

Young Gil Wheeler has one thing on his mind: making enough money to land his own motorcycle. Maybe even a girlfriend. Between selling papers and hawking rings, he dreams of adventure and exploration beyond the expanding edge of post-war Albuquerque.

Together, Gil and his friends navigate their just-built junior high and the desert landscape beyond their neighborhood—a new suburb that, much like their young lives, is brimming with both fresh possibility and the promise that not all dreams will come true.

These interconnected short stories “delight the reader with their minimalist precision, their eccentric humor, and the off-the-wall details of their no-bull realism” (V. B. Price) and “capture boom-town Albuquerque in its first explosion” (Enrique Lamadrid).

This bookstore edition is run on 50# creme paper with a matte laminate paperback cover, printed and bound in the United States.

Praise for The Horse on the Sidewalk:

“The Horse on the Sidewalk by Baker H. Morrow is the best kind of coming-of-age tale, one full of peril and heroism and young love. Interconnected stories reveal Gil Wheeler, a boy becoming a man in postwar Albuquerque, boom years when the city sprawled and young men craved motorcycles. A flawless snapshot of a time and a place worth remembering.”

—Steve Brewer, author of Trouble Town

“These short stories, set in post-WWII Albuquerque, have a vein of innocence running through them, which Morrow brings to the surface with his pitch-perfect dialogue. Listen to these pages: the kids (as well as the alleged adults) are living each messy day as they find it. What a delight.”

—Carl Mayfield, author of Sandia Mountain Sequence