More Curious

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 post–9/11 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 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.