Overview

Mojave Desert, 1957. Vincent Kahn is an astronaut in training, living with his wife in the desert. He will go on to be the first man to walk on the moon. Fay Fern is 19-years-old and working in a dive bar, having rejected her parents' wealth and conservatism. She will go on to become a violent activist and one of the FBI's most wanted. The pair's brief but intense love affair will have repercussions that echo through the American century, intersecting with the race to space, the rage against the Vietnam war, and the ravages of the AIDS epidemic.

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9781474614542

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Reviews

Like Franzen or DeLillo, Alcott brings awe-inspiring exactitude and lyricism to her dive into three of America's most iconic moments.... In her exquisite and poignant reimagining of historic events, Alcott dissects their impacts in a sweeping yet intimate saga that challenges assumptions and assesses the depths of human frustration. - Booklist Sprawling but absorbing.... Ambitious.... Shimmering, knife-sharp descriptions of small and often devastating moments of individual experience within those larger histories.... The reader experiences the era's social upheavals and contests of values at their most intimate register. - New York Times Book Review Sixties radicalism and the space program are set in fruitful juxtaposition in this ambitious.... Displays a sure-handed lyricism... Its energy lies in its skepticism about the American century and the parallels the author finds between contradictory currents. - The New Yorker Ms. Alcott is an impressionistic stylist capable of lovely, luminous effects on the brushstroke level of the sentence.... Such writing seems well suited to fantasy, and because nothing is more like a fairy tale than space travel, it makes sense that Ms. Alcott is at her best in zero gravity. - Wall Street Journal Ms. Alcott's tale of the late 20th-century and its discontents mirrors and contextualizes our current times.... Readers who value elegant style will savor Alcott's musical sentences and dreamlike pacing.... Readers who enjoy literary fiction have a golden opportunity to not just look, but also to really see. Highly recommended. - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette A marvel of compression and controlled description.... Fay's ambition, at the start of America Was Hard to Find, is to make life 'happen more deeply inside her.' Alcott's novel is a finely calibrated machine that does the same for us. - BookForum [Alcott's] prose has a way of finding the cinematic in the personal .... What hooks the reader are Alcott's darts of wisdom and finely tuned observations.... Alcott's narration is penetrating and elegant, but she gives her characters some of the wittiest and most screen-ready dialogue in contemporary fiction. - Paris Review Kathleen Alcott writes with pulsating, intense prose, delivering an account of how lives can be meshed and torn apart.... Powerful.... America Was Hard to Find leaves readers wanting more of this story and everything else Alcott has written. - BookPage

This richly ruminative novel refracts 30 years of American culture and history through the lives of [its] characters.... A sharp and moving reminder of the human dimension of even the most outsize historical events. * Publishers Weekly * Like Franzen or DeLillo, Alcott brings awe-inspiring exactitude and lyricism to her dive into three of America's most iconic moments.... In her exquisite and poignant reimagining of historic events, Alcott dissects their impacts in a sweeping yet intimate saga that challenges assumptions and assesses the depths of human frustration. * Booklist * Alcott offers her own anti-war observation of Cold War America.... The elegance of Alcott's writing poses an interesting contrast to her heroine's inner life.... Alcott brings her full aesthetic gifts to bear. * Longreads * Kathleen Alcott writes with pulsating, intense prose, delivering an account of how lives can be meshed and torn apart.... Powerful.... America Was Hard to Find leaves readers wanting more of this story and everything else Alcott has written. * BookPage * [Alcott's] prose has a way of finding the cinematic in the personal .... What hooks the reader are Alcott's darts of wisdom and finely tuned observations.... Alcott's narration is penetrating and elegant, but she gives her characters some of the wittiest and most screen-ready dialogue in contemporary fiction. * Paris Review * A marvel of compression and controlled description.... Fay's ambition, at the start of America Was Hard to Find, is to make life 'happen more deeply inside her.' Alcott's novel is a finely calibrated machine that does the same for us. * BookForum * Ms. Alcott's tale of the late 20th-century and its discontents mirrors and contextualizes our current times.... Readers who value elegant style will savor Alcott's musical sentences and dreamlike pacing.... Readers who enjoy literary fiction have a golden opportunity to not just look, but also to really see. Highly recommended. * Pittsburgh Post-Gazette * Ms. Alcott is an impressionistic stylist capable of lovely, luminous effects on the brushstroke level of the sentence.... Such writing seems well suited to fantasy, and because nothing is more like a fairy tale than space travel, it makes sense that Ms. Alcott is at her best in zero gravity. * Wall Street Journal * Sixties radicalism and the space program are set in fruitful juxtaposition in this ambitious.... Displays a sure-handed lyricism... Its energy lies in its skepticism about the American century and the parallels the author finds between contradictory currents. * The New Yorker * Sprawling but absorbing.... Ambitious.... Shimmering, knife-sharp descriptions of small and often devastating moments of individual experience within those larger histories.... The reader experiences the era's social upheavals and contests of values at their most intimate register. * New York Times Book Review *

Author Information

Born in 1988 in Northern California, Kathleen Alcott is the author of the novels Infinite Home and The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets. Born and raised in Northern California, Kathleen Alcott presently resides in Brooklyn. Her short fiction, criticism, and essays have appeared in The New York Times, the Guardian, The New Yorker online and elsewhere. In 2017, her short story ""Reputation Management"" was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award. A fellow of the MacDowell Colony, she has taught at Columbia University at Bennington College.

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