Acid West, Joshua Wheeler
Acid West, Joshua Wheeler
List: $22.95 | Sale: $16.07
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Acid West
Essays

Author: Joshua Wheeler

Narrator: Andrew Eiden

Unabridged: 12 hr 40 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/17/2018

Synopsis

A rollicking debut book of essays that takes listeners on a trip through the muck of American myths that have settled in the desert of our country’s underbellyEarly 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.

About Joshua Wheeler

Joshua Wheeler is from Alamogordo, New Mexico. He teaches creative writing at Louisiana State University.

About Andrew Eiden

Andrew Eiden is an audiobook narrator who came from a long line of theater folk and has been acting since the age of four. He has starred in dozens of commercials as well as multiple television shows. At the age of eleven, he won first place in a local drama festival, which jumpstarted his acting career. He has performed in theaters ranging from the Glendale Center Theater to the Pasadena Playhouse.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Hank on September 17, 2018

Another one I'd round up to 3.5 stars. Liked and sort-of-liked, and will admit to skimming through in parts, when the author just would not get to it. As far as the creative nonfiction genre goes, I do like that Joshua Wheeler writes with a commitment to fact (endnotes! footnotes!) as well as a lite......more

Quotes

“Rebelling against the picturesque and celebrating the unglamorous, Joshua Wheeler’s debut essay collection escorts us through an unseen side of New Mexico…both wholly Western and wholly American, filled with possibility and heartbreak, messy with oddity and irony.” O, The Oprah Magazine

“Geographers and journalists tend to think of the Southwest as a region, but in truth, it’s more a haphazard assortment of microclimates, environmental and cultural…Joshua Wheeler detours around them all in favor of his native southern New Mexico in the engagingly chatty and seriocomic Acid West.” Los Angeles Times

“Wheeler’s essay collection Acid West is alive, unglamorous, funny, visceral, American, a Martin Parr-esque look at a country that has always been in the business of redefining itself.” Literary Hub

“Acid West is worth its weight in gold.” Geoff Dyer, Lannan Literary Award-winning author

“Wheeler’s essays throb with radioactive resonance and the Technicolor brilliance of a desert sunset.” Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Battleborn

“A collection of essays that 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 it.” John D’Agata, author of The Making of the American Essay

Awards

  • Audible Pick
  • Oprah’s Book Club Selection
  • Paris Review Selection
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