Adam Gnade's work comes from the heart of summer and "the heart of Saturday night." It's a dirty, knocked-down America of truckstops and mall parking lots, water towers and grain silos, late-night conversation on porches, dark woods, and fields, wild times in neonlit cowboy bars or sunlit apartment blocks where you feel like the last human on Earth. Spread across a connected series of novels and audio recordings of writing backed by noisy folk music self-described as "talking songs," his cast of reoccurring characters inhabits a world of loneliness on river docks at sundown, cattle towns, and beach houses, vodka in the evening heat, sailor bars and bayside piers, bats in the dusk, the sound of distant freight trains, the clatter of BQE, failing industry, red brick tenements, ghost towns of factories, the Atlantic Seaboard or the Pacific Ocean as the end of the world, foggy San Francisco streets, morning skies over Brooklyn looking for the ghost of Lou Reed, punk songs on long Southern drives, country music radio in Texas desert, crumbling farmhouses in the weeds, good and ill, sweet and vile, all the truth.
