Running After Antelope / Edition 1

by Scott Carrier

Overview

The wildly various stories in Running After Antelope are connected and illuminated by a singular passion: the author's attempt to run down a pronghorn antelope. His pursuit-odd, funny, and inspired-is juxtaposed with stories about sibling rivalry, falling in love, and working as a journalist in war-torn countries. Scott Carrier provides a most unique record of a most unique life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781582431796
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	02/28/2002
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Scott Carrier started working as an independent writer and producer for NPR's "All Things Considered" in 1983. Since 1994 he has been a contributor to Ira Glass's "This American Life." His writing has appeared in Harper's, Esquire, and Rolling Stone. He lives in Salt Lake City with his family.

Read an Excerpt

"We chase them over another little hill, and on the other side the three have become eight, and they are a long ways off, so it's impossible to tell which are the three we began chasing. We follow them for five or ten minutes and then they split into three groups that all go in different directions. We can't tell which group has even one of the antelope we started chasing, they all look so much alike, especially from a distance. We choose two does and follow them, and they run over another hill. On the other side, all of a sudden, there are twenty of them, running as a herd...Following this herd is like following a school of fish. They blend and flow and change positions. There are no individuals, but a mass that move across the desert like a pool of mercury on a glass table. They split again, bursting into five pieces, and it's just too confusing; we can't tell whether we're chasing animals that have run for two minutes or twenty minutes or two hours. I catch up with my brother and he says, "Man, did you see them run? They just zoom and they're gone." I ask him how we're going to get around how they group and split like that, and he says, "I don't know, I've been thinking about it and I don't know."

"What do you think we should do?" I ask.

"I think we should try it again. Let's find some more."

"And so we do. We chase antelope off and on for two days, but, basically they just ditch us every time."
—excerpt from Running After Antelope

Table of Contents

	1963	3
	Little League Haiku	5
	Condor Bones	7
	1982	10
	Windfall	13
	1984	19
	Come to Stay	21
	1987	23
	Trout Stream Families	25
	1990	27
	The Friendly Man	28
	1991	35
	The Test	38
	1992	45
	Carpenter	47
	Hitchhike	52
	1993	62
	A Trip to Cambodia	65
	1994	80
	Cambodia, Revisited	82
	1996	93
	Kashmir	94
	1997 the Seri	108
	Chiapas	112
	1997 the Chase	127
	Acknowledgments	129

Editorial Reviews

Scott Carrier is an American original, a voice with both edge and empathy. To have his words on the page is a delight and an inspiration, reminding us that the path of any good writer is to be both observer and participant. Running After Antelope is smart, quick-witted, heartbreaking in its truth, and alive. Carrier is a great storyteller. Perhaps our generation has found its own B. Traven.

Terry Tempest Williams

Somebody call the President. Scott Carrier should be designated a National Park. His humor is as dry as Death Valley, his stories have more striations than the Grand Canyon and you can count on his passion to bubble out of the ground more often than Old Faithful. After reading Running After Antelope you'll want to hang the Yellowstone entrance sign around his neck: For the benefit and enjoyment of the people.

Sarah Vowell

Jesus, I've been waiting for someone to cut through the crap, stop the stancing, and finally love this pug-ugly monster of a country and the brutal, bigfoot tracks it leaves around the planet. Scott Carrier has the fresh voice and wide-open eyes to take us inside ourselves and our ground and our disease. And if you don't want to run down an antelope, you don't understand the pace of our appetites and dreams. This is the book to end the boredom of our stock market minds and return us to all those lusts and hopes that fuel the fires of our love. Something wonderful is happening here and it is about time.

Charles Bowden

When I call Scott Carrier's essays sad and spooky, I mean it in a good way. Running After Antelope grips, shocks, and then settles in for a long and satisfying haunt.

David Sedaris

Radio meets print journalism in this slim, entertaining anthology of outtakes from Carrier's last 20 years as a writer, hitchhiker, radio producer and occasional war correspondent. The book consists of stories originally broadcast on National Public Radio's All Things Considered and Public Radio International's This American Life; magazine articles originally published in Harper's and Esquire; and a narrative detailing Carrier's obsessive attempts to literally run down a pronghorn antelope. As with all anthologies, some pieces are more successful than others. The best story, "The Test," chronicles a temp job in which Carrier interviewed people on Medicaid support for schizophrenia, taking the agonizing responses and reducing them to statistics and cold data; in the piece's shattering climax, Carrier turns inward and forces himself to answer the same questions. Other stories focus on Carrier's rough-and-tumble encounters with memorable, oddball characters like his brother (a vertebrate morphologist who collected roadkill in the name of science) or the fundamentalist carpenters of "Windfall" (who were obsessed with Star Trek, the Trilateral Commission and Ted Kennedy). The least effective parts are Carrier's experiments as a foreign correspondent in Kashmir, Cambodia, and Chiapas, Mexico, where his touristic narratives are too thin for the gravity of the tragedies he's writing about. ("You'll never figure it out in ten days," a woman in Chiapas told him angrily. "It's pretty arrogant and stupid to even think you could.") The rest of the book, however, is more perceptive and honest, as well as funny. While this "greatest hits" selection may not propel Carrier into the celebrity ranks of fellow NPR alumni David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell, it's a fine performance. (Mar.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Carrier, a regular contributor to Ira Glass's This American Life, sees the experiences of life as a series of little stories to be shared. In this slim narrative, he gathers his autobiographical essays from radio as well as longer stories that have appeared in Harper's and Esquire, organizes them in chronological order, and envelopes the reader with his quests. He shares his pursuit of a pronghorn antelope and the challenges in his ultimate mission in search of adulthood, happiness, and success. Carrier's trek takes him from Lawrence, KS, through the American West to an assignment in Cambodia that left him exhausted and sad, to other foreign lands and back to Salt Lake City, where he is happiest. Carrier writes with humor and wit while inviting his readers into his thoughts, his stories, and his imagination. Recommended for all libraries. Cynde Bloom Lahey, New Canaan Lib., CT Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Independent radio producer Carrier has written a series of essays around his attempts to fulfill the unlikely dream of running down a pronghorn antelope. This collection of stories chronicles his travels, the people he met and the landscape, not only in the American West, but also in Cambodia, Kashmir, and Chiapas, where he was a correspondent for National Public Radio. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

This remarkable collection strings together a broad range of bright, engaging personal essays along a common thread: the author's dream of outrunning a pronghorn antelope. Carrier has been writing about the American West since 1983 for outlets as varied as Harper's and Esquire in print and All Things Considered and This American Life on the radio. His insight and wit render with the panache of good fiction his real-life experiences, from interviewing Medicaid-receiving schizophrenics in Utah and renovating a house to hitchhiking across America and exploring Cambodia, Kashmir, and Mexico. Memoir-essays about his family, neighbors, solitude, exploration, and pursuit of the antelope are simultaneously a relentless and exultant investigation of the quests and passions of the people he encounters along the way. Crystallized details that feel like excerpts from much longer stories afford brief, Technicolored glimpses into other people's lives: a modern dancer's feet are like suspension bridges; a Serbian truck driver tries to sell his cousin's religious paintings in the basement of a renovated Pennsylvania pizza parlor; an idealistic young American woman among the international observers in Chiapas smokes a pipe. Not for Carrier the self-aggrandizing bravado of the journalist who has seen and done it all—rather, he expresses the humble awe of someone who has been lucky enough to see a bit of the world's beauty and tried to make some sense of it. His concise mastery of language is an absolute joy. Surreal and surprising, funny and unsettling, Carrier's ebullient work defies common sense and annihilates the commonplace.

Kirkus Reviews