Clumsy, violent, absurdly funny, and punctuated by a liquid asset worth millions in its finest form, sex between thoroughbred horses is an odd affair. The process starts with a "teaser" horse that tends to the tedious matter of foreplay, while shielding the main event's star from errant kicks. After the mare begins the unseemly business of vaginal "winking," the stud assumes his heroic stance, mounting his partner in front of a chorus of admirers who must juggle their excitement with the shrieking horror of the proceedings. Such is life for the handlers profiled in Stud, an enjoyable account of the high-stakes world of thoroughbred breeding. Opening with a profile of Storm Cat, an accomplished sire whose one-time stud fee has reached $500,000, author Kevin Conley meanders through Kentucky horse country in search of trade secrets and anecdotes too rich for fiction. Conley, an editor at The New Yorker, adopts a deft mix of reporterly purpose and outsider's awe as he explores a multimillion-dollar industry governed by the quirks of down-home eccentricity. He plays the straight man at a Lexington horse auction, where auctioneers sing numbers to a crowd that includes the entourage of the crown prince of Dubai (dubbed "The Doobie Brothers" by fellow attendees). Well-bred horses have fetched as much as $13 million at auction, but the micro-economy surrounding thoroughbred racing is primarily dictated by the heart, not by the dollar. Conley taps into the soulful side of the business as he travels through Kentucky, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, and California, hanging out with the earnest folks who imbue the horse world with "a certain dream-come-true ambience." The industry's mundane fixation on sex is thrown into comic relief as breeders dither over horses ranging from swaggering lotharios to performance-shy enigmas possessed of "a prickly, Miles Davis cool." The author dips into his material's subtext, divining issues of class, race, and nobility from the breeding world's mannered tendencies. But at heart, Stud is a story about the oddly moving love between horses and their handlers, horses and other horses, and a writer and his subject.