AUDIOBOOK
About
The citizens of Plainfield, Texas, have had it with the broke-down United States. So they vote to secede, rename themselves America in memory of their former country, and happily set themselves up to receive tourists from their closest neighbor: America. Couldn’t happen? Well, it might, and so it goes in the 13 stories in Matthew Baker’s brilliantly illuminating, incisive, and heartbreaking collection Why Visit America.
The audiobook opens with a seemingly traditional story in which the speculative element is extremely minimal - the narrator has a job that doesn’t actually exist - a story that wouldn’t seem much out of place in a collection of literary realism. From there the stories get progressively stranger: A young man breaks the news to his family that he is going to transition - from an analog body to a digital existence. A young woman abducts a child - her own - from a government-run childcare facility. A man returns home after committing a great crime, his sentence being that his memory - his entire life - is wiped clean.
As the audiobook moves from universe to universe, the stories cross between different American genres: from bildungsroman to rom-com, Western to dystopian, including fantasy, horror, erotica, and a noir detective mystery. Listened to together, these parallel-universe stories create a composite portrait of the true nature of the United States and a Through the Looking-Glass reflection of who we are as a country.
The audiobook opens with a seemingly traditional story in which the speculative element is extremely minimal - the narrator has a job that doesn’t actually exist - a story that wouldn’t seem much out of place in a collection of literary realism. From there the stories get progressively stranger: A young man breaks the news to his family that he is going to transition - from an analog body to a digital existence. A young woman abducts a child - her own - from a government-run childcare facility. A man returns home after committing a great crime, his sentence being that his memory - his entire life - is wiped clean.
As the audiobook moves from universe to universe, the stories cross between different American genres: from bildungsroman to rom-com, Western to dystopian, including fantasy, horror, erotica, and a noir detective mystery. Listened to together, these parallel-universe stories create a composite portrait of the true nature of the United States and a Through the Looking-Glass reflection of who we are as a country.