"[An] impressive debut collection...[Swanson] serves as a candid and empathetic narrator, guiding us with restrained cynicism and enticing prose as he interrogates the stories we tell ourselves to paper over truths we’d rather not face."—The New York Times Book Review
"With this eloquent and insightful collection of 14 essays, Swanson proves that his is an essential voice in the critique of a simultaneously surreal and vulgar modern age." —Angela Lutz, Shelf Awareness (starred review)
"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
"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
“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
“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
“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’s essay collection, Lost in Summerland, is dazzling. I was awed by its intelligence and heart and felt bereft when I finished. It reminded me that a good essay can be as artful and magical as the best short story.”—Hermione Hoby, author of Virtue.
“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
“Beyond their exhaustive intelligence, a large part of what makes Lost in Summerland’s fourteen essays so monstrously enjoyable is that they are what James Wood would call ‘novelistic essays’…Working particularly in the tradition of [David Foster] Wallace and [John Jeremiah] Sullivan, Lost in Summerland waltzes between the global and the local, critical theory and lived experience, philosophical musings and acutely personal insights, all in an effort to diagnose the ‘wearisome existence’ of contemporary American life…It’s difficult to express Lost in Summerland’s excellence without using tired descriptors like ‘urgent’ and ‘necessary,’ but, alas, the book feels both urgent and necessary.” —Brady Brickner-Wood, Ploughshares.
“My own introduction to Swanson’s exquisite prose and equally impressive examination of place was the book’s opening essay, ‘Notes from a Last Man,’ which initially had me worried: the piece is set in my native Fort Lauderdale, Florida, an easy target for any visitor keen on mocking the coastal extravagance of a subtropical economy dependent largely upon the merrymaking tactics of tourism. But when the essay juxtaposed the lyrics of ‘patron saint of Miami pop’ Pitbull with the post–Franco-Prussian War writing of Friedrich Nietzsche and the hedonistic absurdity and ‘older American ethos’ of a cruise line’s television advertisement, all in the context of Swanson’s own general sadness and anxiety, I felt that, and I realized that his writing is not at all interested in mockery, but in camaraderie. The brilliance of these essays is their ability to illuminate the personal through the critical, the political, and the unflinching specifics of place while shining a light into that seemingly distant ideal—the universal. The closing essay, ‘Church Not Made with Hands,’ builds ideas of faith and communion into an enchantingly hopeful description of marriage, and I can’t help but think of the promise we all make every time we choose to open a book, ‘vowing to see the world not through the myopia of I, but the panorama of us.’” —Christopher Notarnicola, The Paris Review
“Swanson’s essays are big, embracing, singing works of literary art. You get the sense that he writes each piece as though it might be his last and best. His writing, especially the diction, manages to be genuinely earnest, often somber, while also being unarguably funny—a precision so consistent that his pen can often feel like a scalpel…Throughout the entire collection, Swanson manages to navigate ‘an ozone of cynicism’ with an emotional honesty that is equal parts joyous and painful, that is much more complexly truthful to the world around us than any fast ‘hot take’ you might find on the internet. If I write, when I write, I want to write like this.” —Geoff Martin, The New Quarterly
"The 14 essays of Lost in Summerland range over the continental United States, but their travelogue is spiritual . . . Swanson’s book cuts deep with a shard of mirror, and I’m trying not to bleed." —The Los Angeles Review of Books
“Swanson’s debut collection of non-fiction is a blend of empathetic reporting and incisive thinking that takes the reader on a guided tour of America’s wild, imaginative, and sometimes dangerous myths. Follow him into a mouldering futurist’s Floridian swamp-palace; down the rabbit hole of true crime conspiracies haunting the economically fragile Midwest; into the literal rubble of a Disney-inflected FEMA disaster simulation training center. In a book about the power and limitations of narrative, Swanson’s essays search out older, maybe kinder ways to say new things. Lost in Summerland reminds us that a good and well-told story can, sometimes quite literally, save a person’s life.”—Suzannah Showler, Hazlitt
“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.
"Full of measured skepticism, Swanson’s sharp interrogation of contemporary American life hits hard and true." –Publishers Weekly