Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher

LOST IN SUMMERLAND

Barrett Swanson

Essays

Barrett Swanson embarks on a personal quest across the United States to uncover what it means to be an American amid the swirl of our post-truth climate in this collection of critically acclaimed essays and reportage.

A trip with his brother to a New York psychic community becomes a rollicking tour through the world of American spiritualism. At a wilderness retreat in Ohio, men seek a cure for toxic masculinity, while in the hinterlands of Wisconsin, anti-war veterans turn to farming when they cannot sustain the heroic myth of service. And when his best friend's body washes up on the shores of the Mississippi River, he falls into the gullet of true crime discussion boards, exploring the stamina of conspiracy theories along the cankered byways of the Midwest. Traversing the country, Barrett Swanson introduces us to a new reality. At a moment when grand unifying narratives have splintered into competing storylines, these critically acclaimed essays document the many routes by which people are struggling to find stability in the aftermath of our country's political and economic collapse, sometimes at dire and disillusioning costs. Barrett Swanson was the 2016-2017 Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and was the recipient of a 2015 Pushcart Prize. His short fiction and essays (including some of the essays in this collection) have been distinguished as notable in Best American Essays (2014, 2015, and 2017), Best American Sports Writing (2017), Best American Travel Writing (2018), and Best American Non Required Reading (2014). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Harper's Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, The Believer, The Guardian, Orion, Guernica, Pacific Standard, New England Review, The Southern Review, The Point, and the Mississippi Review, among others. He and his wife live in Madison, Wisconsin.

Available products
Book Published 2021-05-18 by Counterpoint

Comments

Swanson searches for sense and narrative in a world that is often senseless and even bleak. While he provides more questions than answers, Swanson's contemplative collection is relatable, timely, and thought-provoking.

As the narrative of American exceptionalism collapses swiftly and spectacularly all around us, I'm grateful for Barrett Swanson's brilliance and clarity, his affectionate skepticism of our most violent games and lies, his earnest and anxious interrogations of twenty-first-century masculinity. Lost in Summerland is an essay collection of the very highest order: a book that poses more questions than it seeks to answer, a book that has wrestled my empathy for the fucked-up citizens of our tragicomic era and country into new, uncomfortable, gorgeously fruitful places.

Casting a net of electric prose, these essaysmiraculouslycatch midair the hot shrapnel of an exploding moment. In Swanson's humane and gifted hands, the glowing fragments light a path through our national dreamlife, illuminating America's new paradoxes and precarities

Lost in Summerland collects a singular sensibility: fourteen essays of searing intelligence throbbing with uncommon sensitivity and executed with incomparable style. Barrett Swanson is his generation's Joan Didion, running down the centrifugal flingings where the center once held, exorcising the pain and folly of living in a nation fervently in denial of and devoted to its own decline. An absolutely essential read.

More than most writers, Barrett Swanson is a first-rate cultural anthropologist. Perceptive, amusing, searching, he scans and gazes past the variety of scrims the world has set out to cloud our vision. His brilliant essays bring so much back into focus, while also noting the American surrealism of the American dream. There is not a weak link in this collection. Every piece is a gem.

Barrett Swanson is our eloquent guide on this tour through the toxic masculinity industrial complex, disaster capitalism, and other exhibits of a lonely, lost America. In essays that are moving and candid, personal and sweeping, Lost in Summerland seeks alternatives to national myths and tries to name the 'unnamable turbulence' we're living through, to rescue the ineffable from invisibility.

With potent lucidity and fierce intelligence, Barrett Swanson pierces the superficial arguments that make so much of our moment strange and alienating. The range of these essays is astonishing, but more electrifying still is the agility with which Swanson probes the deep mysteries of masculinity, ecological threat, capitalism, and race to reveal thrilling if terrifying connections. Barrett Swanson is a tremendous writer, and this collection provides one of the truest, most haunting portraits of our time I've ever read.