Lost In Summerland: Essays [Hardcover]

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, antiwar 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.
 
In this exhilarating debut, 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.“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

Swanson . . . serves as a candid and empathetic narrator, guiding us with restrained cynicism and enticing prose as he interrogates the stories we tell ourselves to paper over truths we’d rather not face . . . His essays reveal a thinker willing to wrestle with the realization that there is more beyondl#�