Postcards from the End of America

“Linh Dinh’s Postcards from the End of America is a collection of some of the most brilliant observations penned on the terminal decline of the American empire. He gives a voice to those rendered invisible by a bankrupt corporate press. He has an unflinching honesty, refusing to romanticize the poor while also writing with great empathy about their lives. He lays bare the predatory evil of corporate capitalism, the death of liberty engendered by our security and surveillance state and the human cost of our system of inverted totalitarianism. He would make George Orwell or Joseph Roth proud. There are few writers in America I admire more.” —Chris Hedges, author of Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt

“Linh Dinh’s Postcards From the End of America, which chronicles a declining America through the author’s travels among the down and out. Perhaps many liberal and leftist writers think they should reach out to this part of our country, but Linh Dinh is one of the few to do it.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, answering “What do you plan to read next?” in The New York Times Book Review

“If this nation’s ego is represented by the politicians, then its collective unconscious is riding in the seat next to Linh Dinh’s on the Greyhound bus, or slumping on the neighboring stool in the dive bar. In these—what do we call them? new-journalist epistles? prose poems? revelatory philippics? absurdist love letters?—Dinh introduces us to the legion of people not encompassed by any candidate’s plan for economic recovery. This book is a howl of joy and a laugh of despair.” —Matthew Sharpe, author of Jamestown and The Sleeping Father

“In today’s celebrity-obsessed culture so focused on the antics of the wealthy and the famous, Linh Dinh stands as one of the only chroniclers of the gritty underside of our society, a very worthy successor to Jacob Riis of New York City’s Gilded Age.  In our increasingly impoverished country, if you want to understand the life of the other half—or the other two-thirds—there are few better guides to the texture of those dismal streets and alleys than Postcards from the End of America.” —Ron Unz, Silicon Valley entrepreneur and publisher of The Unz Review


“Linh Dinh is already one of the secret masters of short fiction.” –Ed Park, editor of the Believer and author of Personal Days


“Dinh’s abrupt epiphanies mix ADD with Thoreau’s economy, Calvino’s globe-trotting, and a pungent eroticism reminiscent of Kawabata’s Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.” –Village Voice