"Imagine that one night at a bar there’s an exuberantly long sentence by the novelist David Foster Wallace, and at the other end of the bar there’s a fantastically implausible story by Herodotus, and on the jukebox is an essay by Rachel Carson, performed by Queen, remixed by Baz Lurhman. The lights go out, the floor tilts, and nine months later there’s Joshua Wheeler, a writer with a marauding curiosity whose spectacular debut collection raids American history, cosmology, family lore, Hollywood, aeronautics, video games, and even the landscape itself in order to fashion for his beloved Southern New Mexico a vision of the world that could not exist without it. And in the thrall of Wheeler’s beautiful, bawdy, and roguishly charming essays, you’re going to believe."
John D'Agata, author of About a Mountain
