In Farewell Transmission, Will McGrath guides us on a rambling quest into the
enlightenment of other lives. Funny and weird, heartbreaking and galvanizing,
these essays take us from Yemen to Lesotho to the Bronx and beyond. We find
Caravaggio at an Arizona homeless shelter and Elvis in rural Canada. We meet
street preachers and diamond miners and professional wrestlers and
ex-cons—those wilderness prophets too frequently cropped from the picture and
pushed out of the frame.
This
is a book of hiddenness: of secret lives and inscrutable passions, of ghost
stories and hallucinations, of excavations into landscapes rarely seen. Whether
he’s unraveling the mysterious history of a noose in Namibia or rambling
through the Driftless Area with a modern-day goatherd, Will McGrath is in search
of the invisible forces that bind us across our wondrous and troubling planet.
Like John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead and Leslie Jamison’s The
Empathy Exams, these dispatches pulse with electric prose and vivid
characters.
Farewell Transmission is a book about paying attention: to the concealed lives and hidden worlds we
encounter every day.