FROM REGAL HOUSE PUBLISHING | MARCH 4, 2025
A struggling theater troupe tours the Midwest by surreal train—where aspects of their plays come to life and wreak havoc—in this inventive literary novel.
“Play, With Knives is a work of wondrous imagination—a dream from which I did not want to awaken.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author of Eat Pray Love, The Signature of All Things, and City of Girls
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 Cinnamon Literature Award AND THE 2022 Nilsen Prize for a First Novel
Edgar Cosentino can’t stand lies. A talented painter, he’s hired as the set designer for a struggling theater troupe touring the Midwest by train. Within its eccentric cast, he finds happiness in his budding relationship with actress Ava Vale, but Ava soon realizes his revulsion for lying has accidentally trapped her with a secret—she’s technically married.
All the while, playwright Fallon Finn-Dorset watches this drama unfold and incorporates aspects into her plays. But strange things happen on the train. There’s a partly tame fox and a barman resembling Abraham Lincoln, and random elements of Fallon’s writings magically come to life. Lies blur with truth, and fiction populates reality in ways that have dangerous consequences for Edgar, Ava, and others. Can their stories be rewritten to save the relationship as well as the future of the troupe?
Play, With Knives is a highly inventive novel—surreal and poetic, yet full of lighthearted humor—about the morality of art, the subjectivity of truth and reality, and the magic of the written word.
MORE PRAISE FOR PLAY, WITH KNIVES
“I love and admire the pulsing vitality of Play, With Knives. Horn’s formal ingenuity and her exquisite prose—so precise, lyrical, rhythmically adept—make this book a delight to be inside of. It’s a novel that seems to have been written with a genuine sense of pleasure, play, and possibility.” —Chris Bachelder, author of The Throwback Special, finalist for the 2016 National Book Award
“What a wild ride! Jeanette Horn’s new novel is part stage play, part novel, part freak out. Think of the comedic best best of Richard Brautigan and Tom Robbins and the unsettling brilliant weirdness of Leonora Carrington, and you’ll have a little idea of what you’re in for. Have a seat in the bar car and get ready for the show. Unforgettable!” —Christian Kiefer, author of The Heart of It All
“Jeanette Horn's prose is as sharp and unexpected as a paper cut.” —Alia Volz, author of Home Baked, finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award
“Working at the very limit of fiction, Jeanette Horn has conjured a wickedly alluring romance out of razor-sharp sentences and tricks of the light. Each page offers a magnificent illusion. Each page tempts to a shining edge. Play, With Knives is rare and dangerous, a novel so honed it slices as it sings.” —Joanna Ruocco, author of Dan
“Jeanette Horn’s exquisite debut, Play, With Knives, is a meticulously crafted novel about art, love, trust, identity, the nature of reality, and ‘the mission of living.’ On this surreal train ride through a world outside of time, through an aspirational Midwest of European cities, we meet a cast of troubled actors and their obsessive playwright, who works on the knife's edge between artifice and reality. With lyrical sensibility, coy humor, and a Nabokovian sense of lexical gamesmanship, Horn gives us riveting plays within plays about the stakes of artmaking and the lives that we venture to live when we are prepared to risk it all—on the page as well as off it.” —Debora Kuan, author of Women on the Moon, Lunch Portraits, and Xing
"Jeanette Horn’s Play, With Knives is a delightful and wry look at the many ways language conceals as much as it reveals. In Horn’s nimble prose, we follow a troupe of actors (and a playwright) as they tour a Europe of the imagination (it’s actually the Midwest) while their lives intertwine both onstage and off. At every moment, these characters' interactions blur the line between performance and the inner life, and the play of surface and depth reveals itself in jewel-like sentences I kept re-reading for their sheer beauty. It’s a gift to find sentences of such fine detail in a book capacious enough to include recurrent passages from a physics textbook and an Abraham Lincoln lookalike who pours drinks behind the bar. Play, With Knives is a terrific debut by a seriously talented writer." —Jared Stanley, author of So Tough