The Bull

A free download from the author of Taurus and The Wolf

Joseph Smith is the author of two novels, The Wolf and Taurus, and, most recently, Finally My Ambulance, a collection of short stories. He lives in London.

Joseph Smith's bestial myth is a strikingly alternative pastoral. Taurus is the psychologically unnerving and viscerally detailed story of a bull. This extract offers a taste of a powerful, beautiful and extremely unusual novel of animal life. It also introduces readers to an original voice in contemporary fiction, one that is both raw and refined.

The Wolf & Taurus

For the first time, a combined edition of the breathtaking, brilliantly imagined The Wolf, and Taurus

[On The Wolf :] He is an intriguing narrator, brough to life in lean, elegant and rather beautiful prose

[On The Wolf: ] It's convincing... Give that alpha male an alpha for eloquence

Like nothing you have ever read, except perhaps William Blake's daunting vision as articulated in 'The Tyger'... There is a wonderful, soaring artistry at work... Taurus is a subtle morality play; beautiful, relentless and unforgettable

Beautiful and cruel, ancient and new, it expands on Smith's previous novella, The Wolf, by adding more human cruelty into the mix. As a bull gradually awakens into its true self, its appointment with the corrida grows ever closer. It's a stunning but uncomfortable read and one Jill feels absolutely privileged to have read

Joseph Smith is the author of The Wolf and Taurus. He lives in London.

'I am the wolf, taker of life: the predator. I attack with my eyes open and see death bright and fierce leap in the glance of my prey' 
 
In a bleak winter landscape a wolf is starved and weakening. He is the predator, but the harshness of nature, the death that stalks all of the wild forest, beings to challenge his supremacy, and his understanding of himself. 
 
'I can see myself - I can see the large black shape planted on short legs, the thick shoulders and neck and the huge broad head with horns pointing skyward. I swish my tail and snort and stamp and I can see a bull, doing these things' 
 
Under a blazing sun a bull paces back and forth, his skin flickering in the heat. Weighed down by his own mass, his senses are dulled by the dust and lethargy of the farm. A boy tends him from a distance, and in this boy he senses the possibility of a different path: of swirls of colour and movement, of his own power and strength - a premonition of what he might create through violence. 
 
In these two novellas, presented here in one edition for the first time, Joseph Smith transports the reader wholly into the mind of an animal, exploring the violence of the forest and the bull-ring from a new perspective, in writing both immediate and incandescent.

Joseph Smith

An album of thirteen short stories. An invitation to embark on a journey: from modern urban London, to a river in Africa, to world war, to the near and not-so-near past, to death and the ultimate state. 
 
Joseph Smith’s third book, Finally My Ambulance, is a flow of fiction, powerful stories that stand alone, but are interconnected in theme and tone; voices from the author of The Wolf and Taurus, voices in human form (mostly), still fierce in directness and purpose, laced with playful cruelty, originality, and ultimately the possibility of compassion. 
 
With his first two books Joseph Smith showed himself to be a writer of astonishing power and originality. Now he has written another unique work, emerging hungrily from the darker woods of contemporary fiction.

Joseph Smith

Books by Joseph Smith

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