Farewell Transmission: Notes from Hidden Spaces

by Will McGrath

Overview

In Farewell Transmission, Will McGrath guides us on a rambling quest into the enlightenment of other lives. Funny and weird, heartbreaking and galvanizing, these essays take us from Yemen to Lesotho to the Bronx and beyond. We find Caravaggio at an Arizona homeless shelter and Elvis in rural Canada. We meet street preachers and diamond miners and professional wrestlers and ex-cons—those wilderness prophets too frequently cropped from the picture and pushed out of the frame.

 

This is a book of hiddenness: of secret lives and inscrutable passions, of ghost stories and hallucinations, of excavations into landscapes rarely seen. Whether he’s unraveling the mysterious history of a noose in Namibia or rambling through the Driftless Area with a modern-day goatherd, Will McGrath is in search of the invisible forces that bind us across our wondrous and troubling planet. Like John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead and Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, these dispatches pulse with electric prose and vivid characters.

 

Farewell Transmission is a book about paying attention: to the concealed lives and hidden worlds we encounter every day.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781950539727
Publisher:	Dzanc Books
Publication date:	08/09/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Will McGrath has worked as a reporter, homeless shelter caseworker, public radio producer, UPS truck loader, Burger King mayo-applicator, ghostwriter, and ghosteditor, in slightly different order.

 

He spent twenty months living in the southern African kingdom of Lesotho – the subject of his book, Everything Lost is Found Again (Dzanc Books 2017), which won the Disquiet Open Borders Book Prize in 2017.  He has written for The Atlantic, Pacific Standard, Foreign Affairs, Guernica, and Roads & Kingdoms, among other magazines and journals.  His writing has won nonfiction awards including the 2014 Felice Buckvar Prize and has been translated into Chinese, Hungarian, and Japanese.

Table of Contents

Overture

Bird & Spade 9

Invisibilities

The Kings of Simcoe County 15

Huron River Drive 27

A Noose in Hentiesbaai 51

Hallucination (Donut Shop) 67

Keyhole to Sana'a 73

Death of the Virgin 89

Hallucination (Active Shooter) 101

Excavations

Peanut's Odyssey 109

Ballad of the Curtain Jerker 133

The Open Pits 153

Steel Tracks 161

Hallucination (Hotel Room) 181

Garden of the Goatherd 179

Farewell Transmission 193

Coda

Hallucination (San Sebastian) 205

Editorial Reviews

06/13/2022

Memoirist McGrath (Everything Lost Is Found Again) brings sharp observations and keen curiosity to these globe-trotting essays. In “A Noose in Hentiesbaai,” he visits a beach town in Namibia and explores the different stories residents tell about how a noose came to hang from a tree in the town square. In “The Open Pits,” McGrath goes to a diamond mine in Lesotho, where his whiteness gains him access to the camp’s executive spaces and he’s witness to stomach-churning casual racism: “I wanted to document all the ways these men were gentle and loving and seeped full of racial bile... their empathy cored out and replaced with an incurious blankness about those with whom they shared their days.” In “Ballad of the Curtain Jerker,” a chance invitation sends the author on a rollicking tour of Minneapolis’s burgeoning indie wrestling scene, which fuses “Looney Tunes anarchy with wild athleticism and a healthy dose of internet-age self-awareness.” A few pieces lean perilously close to navel-gazing, but for the most part the author’s adept at capturing the world with a buoyant sense of wonder. Armchair travelers will find much to appreciate in these affable, empathetic musings. Agent: Rachel Vogel, DCL Agency. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Everything Lost Is Found Again

"Subtle, witty, and well-observed, McGrath's narrative is a chronicle of spiritual growth and a memorable love letter to the remote African kingdom that stole his heart. A warmly humane memoir." -Kirkus Reviews

"A wonderful book, keenly observed, a breezy, thought-provoking read. ... McGrath is a likable, curious guide, embracing whatever adventures come along." -Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"An endearing combination of insightful commentary and sympathetic comedy. This is a book in the best tradition of travel writing. ... Laugh-out-loud moments are balanced by heart-warming interludes, and altogether, this is an illuminating and enjoyable read that reminds readers of the essential oneness of humanity." -Booklist

"It is messy, often overwritten, sometimes jumbled. But above all it is joyful. McGrath tells his stories, even the tragic ones, with hope and humor—the greatest defenses against despair." -Asymptote

From the Publisher

2022-05-19
Following his memoir of life in the African nation of Lesotho, Everything Lost Is Found Again, McGrath delivers this set of essays, several of which return there and to neighboring African countries.

Among the most compelling, if infuriating, is a sketch of imperious White mine operators who, years after the nation’s independence, continue to scorn the intelligence and work ethic of Africans. “Let’s see what happens when we go,” said one contractor. “This country would fall apart without us.” Another essay that exposes White privilege finds McGrath in a scarcely populated part of Namibia, where he ponders an iconic noose, with all its hints of racism and violence. The author enjoys a good mystery, and one beguiling piece is just that, involving the misadventures of an iPhone, lost in the Hamptons, that improbably landed in Yemen, a journey tracked by software. Not all of the pieces quite work—e.g., an essay that intercuts the murder of a homeless woman in Phoenix with a portrait of the Renaissance painter and general ne’er-do-well Caravaggio. The occasional misfire notwithstanding, McGrath frames most of his stories so invitingly that one can’t help but read on, as when he asks, “Why does one go to an Elvis Presley impersonator festival in the county of Simcoe, in the province of Ontario, in the country of Canada, on the planet of Earth?” Less lighthearted but beautifully written is a tour de force exploring a tangled friendship with a homeless Black man, dying of cancer, who ran afoul of the medical orthodoxy, in part by admitting that he would try to find crack upon being released from the hospital. McGrath asked a ward nurse, “So why should Willie have to die on your drugs instead of his drugs?” It’s another good question, one of many.

A mixed bag but with some exceptional, Pushcart-worthy pieces of observation and reportage.

Kirkus Reviews