Acid West: Essays

Acid West: Essays - Paperback

$28.99
$28.99
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Acid West: Essays
  • Acid West: Essays
Acid West: Essays - Paperback

Acid West: Essays - Paperback

by Joshua Wheeler
$28.99
$28.99

Book Overview

A rollicking debut book of essays that takes readers on a trip through the muck of American myths that have settled in the desert of our country's underbelly

Early on July 16, 1945, Joshua Wheeler's great grandfather awoke to a flash, and then a long rumble: the world's first atomic blast filled the horizon north of his ranch in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Out on the range, the cattle had been bleached white by the fallout.

Acid West, Wheeler's stunning debut collection of essays, is full of these mutated cows: vestiges of the Old West that have been transformed, suddenly and irrevocably, by innovation. Traversing the New Mexico landscape his family has called home for seven generations, Wheeler excavates and reexamines these oddities, assembling a cabinet of narrative curiosities: a man who steps from the stratosphere and free-falls to the desert; a treasure hunt for buried Atari video games; a village plagued by the legacy of atomic testing; a lonely desert spaceport; a UFO festival during the paranoid Summer of Snowden.

The radical evolution of American identity, from cowboys to drone warriors to space explorers, is a story rooted in southern New Mexico. Acid West illuminates this history, clawing at the bounds of genre to reveal a place that is, for better or worse, home. By turns intimate, absurd, and frightening, Acid West is an enlightening deep-dive into a prophetic desert at the bottom of America.
ISBN9780374535803
Author Joshua Wheeler
PublisherMCD X Fsg Originals
GenreEducation and Literature
FormatPaperback
PublishedApril 2018
LanguageENG- English
Pages416
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Literary Collections Nonfiction Social Science

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More by Joshua Wheeler

Acid West: Essays

Acid West: Essays - Paperback

Acid West: Essays - Paperback

By Joshua Wheeler

About Joshua Wheeler

Joshua Wheeler is the author of the essay collection Acid West, which was named a best book of 2018 by Newsweek, The Paris Review, and O, The Oprah Magazine. He's written for The New York Times, Alta, and Harper's Magazine, and he teaches at Louisiana State University.

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