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Sign up todayAcid West
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Learn moreA 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 underbelly
Early 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.
Joshua Wheeler is from Alamogordo, New Mexico. He teaches creative writing at Louisiana State University.
Andrew Eiden is an actor and winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award for narration. He has been acting since the age of four, working at regional theaters, in national commercials, and on numerous television shows.
Reviews
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Acid West is worth its weight in gold.”
“Wheeler’s essays throb with radioactive resonance and the Technicolor brilliance of a desert sunset.”
“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.”
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