“Buses,” as Helen Hamilton once ventured, “should inspire writers.” This is certainly the case for Erica Van Horn, whose accounts of bus journeys taken across Ireland achieve the “compound of bathos and pathos” Hamilton proposed in 1913. Replacing the hackneyed footsteps of the flâneur with the more humble and sedentary position of the bus seat, By Bus is a compelling panorama of modern life as it is witnessed among the rhythms, odors, phone conversations, and evanescent idiosyncrasies of the bus journey. From lonely widowers to eczema sufferers, detours to U-turns, the quality of the story is in Van Horn’s economic telling which is always sharp, exacting, but never judgmental. Just remember, though: one should always, always, thank the driver before getting off the bus.
Ross Hair
Erica Van Horn's By Bus is the perfect vehicle for a uniquely matter-of-fact storytelling style, offering the reader a genuinely local ride.
Lucy R. Lippard
Van Horn is an acute observer of the everyday strange who writes a prose that is both idiosyncratic and transparent, conversational in tone, yet somehow maintaining sufficient detachment.
Billy Mills
I couldn't have loved [By Bus] more. A masterpiece in simplicity and acute observation. I laughed, smiled and was utterly beguiled. And something deeper... a perfect gem.
Keggie Carew
[Van Horn] reveals so much about Ireland and about [herself] through these moments of shared public life in a close space. It is beautifully written and has a cumulative effect.
Sarah Schulman
Praise for Previous Work
Erica Van Horn is an American artist (and writer, editor, printer, bookmaker, and publisher) long transplanted to Ireland where she runs the exquisite Coracle Press with her husband Simon Cutts. Her outsider’s acumen is trained on the minutiae of daily life, collecting visual and textual details of what is often overlooked or seemingly insignificant. In Too Raucous for a Chorus, Van Horn uses a diaristic form to record her observations about birds and the commotion surrounding them—feeding them, first sightings of them, negotiating with their presence in the least bird-like and most human of spaces. Accompanied by delicate illustrations by Laurie Clark, Van Horn creates a beautiful portrait of country life, her neighbors, and the nature itself—in equal measure banal, glorious, full of life and death—that surrounds them, in all weather, season to season.
Lisa Pearson
