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Notes from a small town
Spiegel & Grau
June 2010
On Sale: June 1, 2010
Featuring: Ralph; Kathy; Colter
256 pages
ISBN: 038552286X
EAN: 9780385522861
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Utopia, Texas: Itβs either the best place on earth, or itβs no place at all. In the twenty-first century, itβs difficult to imagine any element of American life that remains untouched by popular culture, let alone an entire community existing outside the empire of pop. But Karen Valby discovered the tiny town of Utopia tucked away in the Texas Hill Country. There are no movie theaters for sixty miles in any direction, no book or music stores. But cable television and the Internet have recently thrown wide the doors of Utopia. Valby follows the lives of four UtopiansβRalph, the retired owner of the general store; Kathy, the waitress who waits in terror for three of her boys to return from war; Colter, the son of a cowboy with the soul of a hipster; and Kelli, an aspiring rock star and one of the only black people in townβas they reckon, on an intensely human scale, with war and race, class and culture, and the way timeβs passage can change the ground beneath our feet. Utopia is the kind of place we still think of as the βreal America,β a place of cowboys and farmers and high-school sweethearts who stay together till they die. But its dramatic stories show us what happens when the old tensions of small-town life confront a new reality: that no town, no matter how small and isolated, can escape the liberating and disruptive forces of the larger world. Welcome to Utopia is a moving elegy for a proud American way of life and a celebration of our relentless impulse toward rebirth.
 Media BuzzMorning Edition - May 31, 2010
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