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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
$25.00
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Non-Fiction
Utopia, Texas: It’s either the best place on earth, or
it’s no place at all. In the twenty-first century, it’s 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 Utopians—Ralph, 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
town—as they reckon, on an intensely human scale, with war
and race, class and culture, and the way time’s passage can
change the ground beneath our feet. Utopia is the kind of place we still think of as the “real
America,” 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.
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