BOOKS
AMERICAN RULE: HOW A NATION CONQUERED THE WORLD BUT FAILED ITS PEOPLE
From writer and political analyst Jared Yates Sexton comes a journey through the history of the United States, from the nation’s founding to the twenty-first century, which examines and debunks the American myths we’ve always told ourselves.
In recent years, Americans have faced a deluge of horrifying developments in politics and culture: stolen elections, fascist rallies, families torn apart and locked away. A common refrain erupts at each new atrocity: This isn’t who we are.
In American Rule, Jared Yates Sexton upends those convenient fictions by laying bare the foundational myths at the heart of our collective American imagination. From the very origins of this nation, Americans in power have abused and subjugated others; enabling that corruption are the many myths of American exceptionalism and steadfast values, which are fed to the public and repeated across generations. Working through each era of American growth and change, Sexton weaves together the origins and perpetuation of these narratives still in the public memory, and the acts we have chosen to forget.
Stirring, deeply researched, and disturbingly familiar, American Rule is a call to examine our own misconceptions of what it means, and has always meant, to be an American.
THE MAN THEY WANTED ME TO BE: TOXIC MASCULINITY AND A CRISIS OF OUR MAKING
“By carefully and soberly examining his own story, Sexton deconstructs American life and gives many examples of how pervasive toxic masculinity is in our culture.” –Henry Rollins, Los Angeles Times
“This book is critically important to our historical moment . . . [C]rackles with intensity and absolutely refuses to allow the reader to look away for even a moment from the blight that toxic masculinity in America has wrought.” –Nicholas Cannariato, NPR
The author of The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore turns his keen eye to our current crisis of masculinity using his upbringing in rural Indiana to examine the personal and societal dangers of the patriarchy. Based on his provocative and popular New York Times op-ed, The Man They Wanted Me to Be is both memoir and cultural analysis. Jared Yates Sexton alternates between an examination of his working-class upbringing and historical, psychological, and sociological sources that examine the genesis of toxic masculinity and its consequences for society.
THE PEOPLE ARE GOING TO RISE LIKE THE WATERS UPON YOUR SHORE: A STORY OF AMERICAN RAGE
The People Are Going To Rise Like The Waters Upon Your Shore is a firsthand account of the events that shaped the 2016 Presidential Election and the cultural forces that powered Donald Trump past Hillary Clinton and into the White House. Featuring in-the-field reports as well as deep analysis, Sexton’s book is not just the story of the most unexpected and divisive election in modern political history. It is a sobering chronicle of the sicknesses that plague our democracy―a divided nation drowning in racism, misogyny, violence, fake news, and deep-rooted political polarization as a result of our self-constructed, technologically-assisted echo chambers. Like the works of Hunter S. Thompson and Norman Mailer―books that have paved the way for important narratives that shape how we perceive not only the politics of our time but also our way of life―The People Are Going to Rise Like The Waters Upon Your Shore is an authoritative depiction of a country struggling to make sense of itself...An instant classic.
AN END TO ALL THINGS
In Jared Yates Sexton’s debut, the stories are small town tales of desperation. The characters are impoverished, lost, and staring deep into the end of things, whether that means their relationships, their way of life, or the world itself. Called “shades of Barry Hannah, Raymond Carver, and Breece D’J Pancake,” the The Portland Book Review declared it “the beginning of a long literary career.”
THE HOOK AND THE HAYMAKER
In the follow-up to his critically lauded debut An End To All Things, Jared Yates Sexton presents twenty-three new stories that pick up where his first book left off. Whether they’re set in a sweat-saturated sparring ring, the backroom of a gas station speakeasy, or in the kitchen of the house down the street, these are glimpses into an America that too-often goes unseen. Witness here the untold tales of the losers and the should’ve-beens, the dreamers and the hustlers, all of them just spoiling for their turn at glory or the inevitable one-two punch that puts them down for good.
“From Hannah’s Airships-style stars on the cover to the Carhartt jacket Sexton’s rocking on the back-cover, this one nails the drawl, sets the stage equal-parts Southern and Midwestern, rushes the tempo, beefs up the characters, and lets them loose. These stories work as a unit, and Sexton is to thank. This collection is built Ford tough. It’s Rocky Mountain cold. Book clocks in somewhere between Brown’s Big Bad Love and Altman’s film-adaptation of Carver’s Short Cuts. Gauge reads true-blue.” –Austin Hayden, Entropy Mag
I AM THE OIL OF THE ENGINE OF THE WORLD
Narcissism. Sexism. Consumerism and technological fetishism. The cult of media and the rot of war. In his third collection of stories, Jared Yates Sexton turns his eye to the ravages of the American Disease with twenty-five of his wildest and most experimental pieces. Told in raving mad prose fit for these savage times, Sexton skewers every sacred cow in an attempt to diagnose the sickness of Now.
“Jared Yates Sexton has written a collection of stories that is of its time. It paints contemporary America as a flawed society, one beset by the lack of free will, intelligence, and a respect for the self, the environment, and culture at large. I Am the Oil of the Engine of the World succeeds not only because its author challenges his own aesthetics but because the book dares to examine the maladies of this contemporary era with honesty and a bit of humor; the results are, at times, unsettling but always exceptional.” –Brian Seeman, Necessary Fiction