Diaz cleverly updates an old-fashioned yarn, and his novel is rife with exquisite moments... -Publishers Weekly, boxed and starred review As Diaz, who delights in playful language, lists, and stream-of-consciousness prose, reconstructs [Hawk's] adventures, he evokes the multicultural nature of westward expansion, in which immigrants did the bulk of the hard labor and suffered the gravest dangers...an ambitious and thoroughly realized work of revisionist historical fiction. -Kirkus [In the Distance] is a hero's journey, or possibly a monster's journey-the ending recalls the austere beauty of the last scenes of Frankenstein-and one of the great pleasures of Diaz's singular book is to observe the complicated ways in which the hero and the monster coexist. -BOMB, Fall Books Preview In the Distance is a singular and haunting novel, an epic journey into the wilderness of nineteenth-century America and into the depths of solitude. In its majestic evocation of landscapes it bears a resemblance to Blood Meridian, but in the meditative precision of its language and the moral compass that spins at its heart, Diaz's novel is a creature all its own, and it's one of the very few works of fiction that transport you, emotionally and imaginatively, to an utterly new place. It's a breathtaking trip. -Paul La Farge If I could hand you this book I would. Read this. Hernan Diaz's In the Distance is a portrait of this country as both a dreamscape and a living nightmare. With echoes of John Williams's Butcher's Crossing, Andrey Platonov's Soul, and Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica, this is fiction at its finest-propulsive, unsettling, wildly ambitious, and an unforgettable journey that we will certainly return to in the years to come. -Paul Yoon, author of The Mountain In the Distance by Hernan Diaz sends a shotgun blast through standard received notions of the Old West and who was causing trouble in it. Hakan and his adventures, which are truly extraordinary, not to mention beautifully written, had me from the novel's first striking chapter to the last. -Laird Hunt On its surface, In the Distance is a haunting and unique tale of survival-with all the thrilling frustrations of such. Deeper still, it is a story about the devastation wrought by the American Dream-the West as it happened to many, in spite of all they'd hoped. -Colin Winnette Great stories are driven by desire. Hakan Soederstroem, the remarkable protagonist of Hernan Diaz's In the Distance, sets off on an unremitting quest to find his brother. As he journeys against the grain of the frontier, Hakan confronts lust, love, honor, greed, and confounding betrayal. He also crafts a solitude that becomes, in Diaz's skilled hands, as American as the landscape. In prose that is as bold as the western sky, Diaz has written an unforgettable tale of soulfulness and survival. -Alyson Hagy, author of Boleto While In the Distance can be read as a revisionist western-and totally enjoyed and chewed on as such-what makes Diaz's book truly exceptional is how far beyond a simple genre it goes. A beautiful, thoughtful, and often heartbreaking exploration of lonesomeness, the simple confusion of just living, and the magnificent need for human connection. -Justin Souther, Malaprop's Bookstore
