Cities in rivers, Oregon Trail, end of summer, and Hymn California

One of my great favorite writers is also one of my great favorite friends. He wrote a book that got published this year, and it's Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac, but today. It's stories about America from a guy that's done more living in 30-some years than three people do in their lives. Raw, vivid, lyric descriptions--sung stories about fighting through hard times in hard places.

Hymn California’s characters witness a strange wide-sweeping, panoramic America unfolding before them, while its 200 pages examine death obsessions, regional history, difficult love, and having an abusive relationship with a place (California) rather than a person. It shows displaced characters scattered across the continent, burdened by fear and homesickness while fighting to have a good time, raise hell, and live unencumbered by bourgeois ideology and “bullshit consumer culture.” Death stalks at every intersection and on every riverbank. Lives sway in the delirium of wartime. Waffle Houses, UFO cults, dead friends, serial killers, yellow-lit billboards, reluctant soldiers, suicidal teenagers, drug dealers, grandparents, Mexican cops, drunken cat-killers, and the Pope collide like trains. As its road story unravels, the characters find heavy violence, superstition, hard drugs, and surreal and wonderful mornings set across the contidental US and Mexico. Says Gnade, “a friend of mine asked me if I was trying to write ‘American magic realism’ with the book and I didn’t really have an answer for him. If it is, it was an accident.”

He lives in Portland, Oregon, and if you do too you can buy the book at Powell's Bookstore. If you don't, you can order it here.