Location: 157 Winslow Way E., Bainbridge Island, WA 98110 | Map Hours: 10am-6pm daily | Phone: (206) 842-5332
With In the Distance Hernan Diaz unravels a lot of our myths about who was doing what to whom in the Old West, all through the eyes of a protagonist who often has no context at all for the horrors (both manmade and natural) unfolding around him. This is Håkan, a young Swede who arrives in San Francisco by accident in the 1840s and for whom things go instantly, disastrously wrong -- and mostly don't go right again. In the Distance is a brutal story, a little like Borges by way of McCarthy, but even the most scaldingly hard parts of the novel are gorgeously rendered. ~ Rafe
— From RafeA young Swedish immigrant finds himself penniless and alone in California. The boy travels East in search of his brother, moving on foot against the great current of emigrants pushing West. Driven back again and again, he meets naturalists, criminals, religious fanatics, swindlers, Indians, and lawmen, and his exploits turn him into a legend. Diaz defies the conventions of historical fiction and genre, offering a probing look at the stereotypes that populate our past and a portrait of radical foreignness.
Hernan Diaz is the author of Borges, Between History and Eternity (Bloomsbury 2012), managing editor of RHM, and associate director of the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University. He lives in New York.
