It's the Vietnam era, and Isaac, a hopeless romantic, has found a job teaching sculpture in an American art colony in Mexico when he falls in love with the willowy girlfriend of a visiting celebrity artist. A cunning bull rancher manipulates the two into facing each other in a highly unconventional bullfight . . .

“Full of humor and insight, Innis' story brings together some of the best aspects of contemporary American fiction in its exploration of what it means to find art in life, and life in art”
— ALA Booklist

“His balanced yet stirring description of the bullfight becomes the subtext for his sensitive depiction of the life of a dedicated artist.”
— Publishers Weekly

“Amusing . . . portrait of an artist as an earnest schlemiel, leavened with an ironic, Hemingwayesque admiration for its south of the border setting.”
— Kirkus Reviews

“Finely drawn with a cunning display of detail and internal emotional conflicts, this bittersweet tale . . . reveals much of the inner nature of human courage, love and ambition.”
— The Dallas Morning News

“. . . (Also Rising) is so rich with wit and art, argument and philosophy, slap-stick and tragedy. . . This book would make a terrific film.”
— Duncan Regehr, artist and actor

“Absolutely the finest description of an American's feelings the first time he enters a bullring. I know. I've been there many times, and I remember the first time vividly!” 
— Budd Boetticher, Hollywood director

“Joe Innis has written a seamless novel that is at once art and argument. It takes you to a world you want to visit. It presents its characters and conflicts with wit and a painterly eye, and leaves you convinced that you've been in the hands of a master . . .”
— Eric Maisel, A Life in the Arts

“The bullfight is unquestionably the best I've ever read on how a man - and a bull - behave and think when encountering each other for the first time. The dialogue throughout is excellent and the atmosphere of San Miguel is captured for all times in these lively pages. Oreajas and Olés for Joe Innis!”
— Barnaby Conrad, best-selling author and artist

“As a professor of literature and an aficionado of the corrida . . . it was a delight to read a book that satisfies both those passions”
— Joe Distler

“ALSO RISING, is not a novel about bullfighting, per se, and what Mr. Innis writes about bullfighting is done in such an original way that it is everything but a cliche. It is a novel that deals with human nature, with the conflict between good and bad, personified by an honest painter and a fake one, respectively, with the concept of plastic art, including bullfighting, and with the clash of American and Mexican cultures.”
—Mario Carrion, writer, bullfighter
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The author welcomes questions, thoughts, and reviews at Books@InnisArt.com