Lost In Summerland

Essays

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Pub Date 18 May 2021 | Archive Date 18 May 2021

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Description

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 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...

Advance Praise

"Swanson’s perspectives are empathetic and honest. The people and situations he describes are considered with the care of a sociologist, but also a sensitive heart. The essay collection Lost in Summerland forwards a smorgasbord of ideas, people, and places, all filtered through the perceptions of a skilled writer." —Peter Dabbene, Foreword Reviews


"A probing essay collection that tackles relevant issues emerging in America’s current shaky political and social climate." —Kirkus Reviews


"Swanson searches for sense and narrative in a world that is often senseless and even bleak . . . Swanson’s contemplative collection is relatable, timely, and thought-provoking." —Booklist 


"Full of measured skepticism, Swanson’s sharp interrogation of contemporary American life hits hard and true." —Publishers Weekly


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.” —Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Gold Fame Citrus 


“Casting a net of electric prose, these essays—miraculously—catch 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.” —Wells Tower, author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned


“Barrett Swanson achieves a sublime density of intellect and soul in Lost in Summerland, a vivid, immersive, fiercely openhearted survey of the American landscape and spirit. In handsome lyrical prose, with the sensitivity of a cultural seismologist, Swanson finds humor and insight erupting everywhere. His unstinting honesty is that of the best memoirists, who remind us that it is reasonable and perverse and exalted just to be a person, awake, alive, listening for the quiet essence in things. Reality is so palpable in these essays that I found myself nostalgic for moments I had never lived.” —Greg Jackson, author of Prodigals


“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." —Elisa Gabbert, author of The Unreality of Memory


“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.” —Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life, finalist for the Booker Prize  


“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.” —Lorrie Moore


“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.” —Lauren Groff, author of Florida

"Swanson’s perspectives are empathetic and honest. The people and situations he describes are considered with the care of a sociologist, but also a sensitive heart. The essay collection Lost in...


Available Editions

EDITION Hardcover
ISBN 9781640094185
PRICE $26.00 (USD)
PAGES 304

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Featured Reviews

I really enjoyed this book and am excited to see what Barrett puts out next. He is a great writer.

Some of these essays were such page-turners that I would have loved a longer format version. I especially liked the areas touching on suburbia, familial issues, football, war, and the mental state that stems from growing up in a culture you don’t really understand.

I came of age near where the author did and haven’t related to a book this much in a while. It’s so human, American and often very Midwestern.

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