Lost In Summerland

"Swanson’s perspectives are empathetic and honest. The people and situations he describes are considered with the care of a sociologist, but also a sensitive heart. The essay collection Lost in Summerland forwards a smorgasbord of ideas, people, and places, all filtered through the perceptions of a skilled writer." —Peter Dabbene, Foreword Reviews


"A probing essay collection that tackles relevant issues emerging in America’s current shaky political and social climate." —Kirkus Reviews

"Swanson searches for sense and narrative in a world that is often senseless and even bleak . . . Swanson’s contemplative collection is relatable, timely, and thought-provoking." —Booklist 

"Full of measured skepticism, Swanson’s sharp interrogation of contemporary American life hits hard and true." —Publishers Weekly

“Lost in Summerland collects a singular sensibility: fourteen essays of searing intelligence throbbing with uncommon sensitivity and executed with incomparable style. Barrett Swanson is his generation’s Joan Didion, running down the centrifugal flingings where the center once held, exorcising the pain and folly of living in a nation fervently in denial of and devoted to its own decline. An absolutely essential read.” —Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Gold Fame Citrus 

“Casting a net of electric prose, these essays—miraculously—catch midair the hot shrapnel of an exploding moment. In Swanson’s humane and gifted hands, the glowing fragments light a path through our national dreamlife, illuminating America’s new paradoxes and precarities.” —Wells Tower, author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

“Barrett Swanson achieves a sublime density of intellect and soul in Lost in Summerland, a vivid, immersive, fiercely openhearted survey of the American landscape and spirit. In handsome lyrical prose, with the sensitivity of a cultural seismologist, Swanson finds humor and insight erupting everywhere. His unstinting honesty is that of the best memoirists, who remind us that it is reasonable and perverse and exalted just to be a person, awake, alive, listening for the quiet essence in things. Reality is so palpable in these essays that I found myself nostalgic for moments I had never lived.” —Greg Jackson, author of Prodigals

“Barrett Swanson is our eloquent guide on this tour through the toxic masculinity industrial complex, disaster capitalism, and other exhibits of a lonely, lost America. In essays that are moving and candid, personal and sweeping, Lost in Summerland seeks alternatives to national myths and tries to name the 'unnamable turbulence' we’re living through, to rescue the ineffable from invisibility." —Elisa Gabbert, author of The Unreality of Memory

“With potent lucidity and fierce intelligence, Barrett Swanson pierces the superficial arguments that make so much of our moment strange and alienating. The range of these essays is astonishing, but more electrifying still is the agility with which Swanson probes the deep mysteries of masculinity, ecological threat, capitalism, and race to reveal thrilling if terrifying connections. Barrett Swanson is a tremendous writer, and this collection provides one of the truest, most haunting portraits of our time I’ve ever read.” —Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life, finalist for the Booker Prize  

“More than most writers, Barrett Swanson is a first-rate cultural anthropologist. Perceptive, amusing, searching, he scans and gazes past the variety of scrims the world has set out to cloud our vision. His brilliant essays bring so much back into focus, while also noting the American surrealism of the American dream. There is not a weak link in this collection. Every piece is a gem.” —Lorrie Moore

“As the narrative of American exceptionalism collapses swiftly and spectacularly all around us, I'm grateful for Barrett Swanson's brilliance and clarity, his affectionate skepticism of our most violent games and lies, his earnest and anxious interrogations of twenty-first-century masculinity. Lost in Summerland is an essay collection of the very highest order: a book that poses more questions than it seeks to answer, a book that has wrestled my empathy for the fucked-up citizens of our tragicomic era and country into new, uncomfortable, gorgeously fruitful places.” —Lauren Groff, author of Florida