Synopses & Reviews
In
More Curious, Sean Wilsey travels across the U.S., from the launchpad at Cape Canaveral, to the isolated artists' enclave of Marfa, Texas, to the boardrooms and ballrooms of post9/11 New York City. Wherever he is, Wilsey captures his surroundings with the precision of a photographer and the raw grace of a skateboarder (he's an amateur practitioner of both arts). And his eye always finds an unrivaled intensity of detail: here, and only here, will a reader be privy to the Dostoyevskian whiff of Marfa's fugitive underbelly, the unsung delights of a skater rag's cooking column, the exact amount of time elapsed since the soundwaves of a long-lost, legendary World Cup broadcast passed out of our solar system.
These essays originally published in Vanity Fair, GQ, McSweeney's, and elsewhere comprise nearly fifteen years of Wilsey's most vital work on the glory and the misery, the beauty and absurdity of contemporary America.
Review
"More Curious is the most delicious of literary smorgasbords. Whether Sean Wilsey's subject is rats, NASA, or a surreal road trip across America, the writing is animated and diverse, dappled with literary oddities and enlivened, always, by his eye for the absurd. More Curious begins by making you wonder what kind of book it is, exactly, and ends by reminding you that categories are nonsense when you're enjoying something this much." Jennifer Egan
Review
"Sean Wilsey puts the fire out with wine, as he reports was done after the 1906 Earthquake in San Francisco. To douse a fire with wine, as I take it, is to respond with something unexpected, and a little extravagant, but in that moment, a tool at hand. Wilsey is playful, maximal, wonkily earnest and fun to read, as he ranges over the varied landscapes of this book." Rachel Kushner
Review
Sean Wilsey's witty essays from his cross-country adventures form a portrait of the weird side of contemporary America.” Los Angeles Times
About the Author
Sean Wilsey is the author of a memoir, Oh the Glory of It All, and the co-editor of State By State: A Panoramic Portrait of America. He lives in Marfa, Texas.