Little, Brown: 272 pages, $27 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. “The last moment of my life, as I’m dying, I would like to smell a horse barn,” Jo Ann Beard tells me over a video chat. It’s not a surprising statement from the Midwesterner who now lives in pastoral Rhinebeck, N.Y., with her partner, the writer Scott Spencer, and two dogs, Beatrice and Jet. She’s just finished recalling a painful visit to the empty duck house in her backyard after most of its inhabitants were killed by a raccoon. (The sole survivor went to a farm sanctuary.)