Car Camping

Mark Sundeen teaches at the University of Montana. He is the author of five other books about the American West, including, mostly recently, Delusions and Grandeur: Dreamers of the New West (UNM Press). He is a contributing editor for Outside Magazine, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic Adventure, The Believer, and Best American Essays.

“A riotous, beautiful, totally original road novel masquerading as a travel book. Sundeen’s America, comprised of equal parts Gorgeous and Awful, absolutely shimmers with life. The prose is pure, wild, naÏve, and poetic; the characters leap off the page in their dunderheadedness and sincerity. A brilliant and auspicious debut.” - George Saunders“A coming-of-age story that never really reaches ‘age’ and doesn’t want to. It’s about someone in search of masculinity and adventure who finds instead broken dreams, ragged humanity, and the ghosts of the West. This book is somehow bone dry and a soaked sponge at once. It’s full of sincerity and wryness, wonder and bite—a story allergic to pretension, grandiosity, and false epiphanies. It’s kinda dirty, and not really that sorry about it—spiritually speaking, it puts the dung back in bildungsroman.” - Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of Splinters and The Empathy Exams“Car Camping takes readers from California to Colorado and all points in between as Sundeen searches the Desert Southwest, looking for love, home, and himself. This book, like Sundeen’s Subaru, will travel you far and show you beautiful sights.” - Sean Prentiss, author of Finding Abbey and Crosscut“In spare, piercing prose, Sundeen distills the itinerants of the American deserts into a series of unforgettable encounters. Car Camping is both hilarious and haunting, a road book that finds wonder in the margins.” - D. Seth Horton, author of On a NASA Flight to Heaven and co-editor of Buffalo Cactus