stalking america
Contributors
Jared Pappas-Kelley
Description
Stalking America blends an interior/exterior assemblage of a young person on a train riding cross-county where everything is subtext and suspicion. Here, events are presented in a glassy contemplation of travel and transition. Stilted and strange dialogue, description, minor reality stars, historical influences, lists, architecture, movements, and mundane pop culture observations of a misinformed but well-meaning observer montage into an internal and external reverie. In America, nothing is seen or spoken directly. Conversations and thoughts wander in from around a corner—a deleted browser history of experience—ripple into the cliché of a coming of age. In this sense America is half-baked like a teenager. The protagonist obsesses over historical references to nude bathers, anarchist colonies, reality television, communes, volcanic eruptions, and songs in a playlist trying to understand a certain aspect of America through observations and false epiphanies. A vacated puzzle attempts to undo itself while each piece ploddingly re-assembles with the assurance of the train ride as elements come into proximity. To understand America, to really appreciate it, is to fundamentally misunderstand it at the deepest levels—to read into its flattening out and image as the ultimate subtext and that is where the story lies.
Back cover blurb
I wish I could wear a permanent wireless earpiece like actors do when they don’t know their lines, and that it was connected to a microphone that Jared Pappas-Kelley hovered perpetually above while simultaneously viewing everything I saw through monitors connected to surveillance cameras littered through my surroundings, and that he could also magically live a rich, full-fledged independent life and keep writing up a storm.
~ Dennis Cooper, author of I Wished
Sometimes who you are is kind of where you come from, and sometimes where you come from is kind of remade by you. Maybe America is a melting pot, maybe it’s a tossed salad. Whatever it is, it’s a mess, just like you and me, if you’re as apple pie as I am, as Columbined and Mayflowered and high schooled and low schooled and junk-fooded and beautiful. That’s us, that’s our US of A. Jared Pappas-Kelley understands why every American feels stalked by history, and also needs to stalk our legacy, our detritus, to do whatever we need to do to understand and maybe make peace with our place in the busted world.
~ Rebecca Brown, author of You Tell the Stories You Need to Believe
Interleaved with the salvage of a Gordon Matta-Clark essay that glides to other sites of narrating memory, Jared Pappas-Kelley’s well-oiled construction here invites us to eavesdrop in a passenger compartment that doubles as confessional space, where connections surface, cathexis is sketched and flipped, and the communal share transpires. His montage has a searching, glowing quality of folds through time, and I find myself sitting back for the deferred destination, morphing graffiti, overheard and worked-through conversations, dips into light abstraction and high-concept fictionalizations like one of reality TV and its reaches; a picnoleptic picaresque. Like the best of waking dreams, it defamiliarizes the seemly, keeping an eye all the while on some expensive shoes and accompanying muffin crumbs across the aisle. It sent me.
~ Douglas A. Martin, author of Wolf
Reviews
Jonathan Mayhew: The Rumpus (featured in Library Journal’s ‘Book Pulse 2023’)
Daniel Davis Wood: 3:AM Magazine
Dennis Cooper: My favourite reads of 2023
Excerpt
‘What you call clouds — I call smoke’ in 3:AM Magazine