Manuel Vilas

A vivid, astonished account of the United States by one of the most lucid writers of our time.

America is the result of a journey, a daydream, and a state of endless agitation. It is a story filled with wonder before the immense vastness of a nation—the United States—that has the proportions of an entire planet, a place where everything fits. America is the depiction of a mythical space: contradictory, beautiful, and always excessive.

Manuel Vilas’s journey through this space is a sentimental and hallucinatory drift across cities where no one goes—or where everyone goes—through ghost motels, endless highways, forests, bars, shops, and small towns with a single street and a church. It is also a voyage through memory, where rock singers, writers, artists, pop icons, forgotten old stars, and even The Simpsons parade by as metaphors for the new American way of life.

In this expanded edition, which includes Vilas’s most recent long stays in the United States, the reader witnesses the violence of a polarized society—an America in cultural and political crisis, with a figure like Donald Trump straining the limits of democracy—and yet one that Vilas knows how to interpret through literature and imagination.