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In his fifth novel, Rudolph Wurlitzer has written a classic tale of the western frontier and created one of his most memorable characters in Zebulon, a mountain man whose view of life has been challenged by a curse from a mysterious Native American woman whose love he inadvertently murdered.

The Drop Edge of Yonder begins in the mountains of Colorado and ends in the far reaches of the Northwest, a journey that includes the beginnings of a Mexican revolution, a voyage across the Gulf of Mexico to Panama, and up the coast of California to San Francisco and the gold fields. Along the trail, Zebulon becomes involved in a series of tragic love triangles, witnesses the death of his mother and father, and confronts the age-old questions of life, love, and death.



* Best Book of 2008. -Michael Miller, Time Out New York

* ForeWord Magazine Gold Medal for Literary Fiction.

* Believer Magazine Reader's Survey Top-20 Book of 2008.

"A picaresque American Book of the Dead... in the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut and Terry Southern."
- David Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"[A] funny, inquisitive novel [that] asks readers to re-examine their ideas of the Western frontier and personal freedom." -Jeffrey Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal

"Wurlitzer delivers a mystic western possessed of anarchic charms and incantatory beauty. This furiously told legend weaves history and myth into a riotous tale." - Publishers Weekly [Starred]-

"Rudy Wurlitzer's first novel in over twenty years may be the most hallucinogenic western you'll ever catch in the movie house of your mind's eye. What results is a genre farce with oracular power - a Queen of Hearts sutra, a court jester's Blood Meridian. Wurlitzer trots through this magic theater like a restless auteur. With Drop Edge, Wurlitzer has considerably raised the stakes. Over and above its loving and wicked send-up of frontier lore, Drop Edge invites us to reframe its fictions, like all fictions, perhaps, as our own Technicolor flashbacks from the dusty arroyo at the end of the line." -Erik Davis, Bookforum

"There's a bawdy, lunatic thrill to the tale that seems somehow radical. It's the kind of book someone will stick in a back pocket before heading out on the trail into the unknown." -Nathan Ihara, LA Weekly

"Drop Edge occupies a space between the whimsical and the mystical, the silly and the sublime. Wurlitzer’s philosophical, humorous, and visionary yarn guides the reader into a landscape in which to wander around and get lost, a West that leads into the numinous terra incognita between sleep and waking, life and death, and toward the contemplation of what it means to cross a frontier. Anthony Miller, LA CityBeat

"In his hero, Zebulon Shook, Wurlitzer has invented a funny, acerbic, hugely compelling representative of American heroism. This is that rare story that improves as it expands, not unlike another rambling picaresque, Don Quixote." Mark Athitakis, Washington City Paper

"Wurlitzer's most satisfying read to date... should be as well known as anything by Cormac McCarthy, Steve Erickson, or Jim Harrison. A pure blast of vituoso storytelling. [Drop Edge] is a book that shows us our own reflection at this exact moment in our history --America as a flailing, undomesticated, wild-eyed, hairy brawler, with a big, confused heart in rebellion against the coarse exigencies of existence and civilization." -Paul DiFilippo, Barnes & Noble Review

"An epic Western and a summation of all that's great about Wurlitzer's novels and film scripts... an old hand laying down what may well be the best piece of writing he's ever done." - Arthur Magazine

"Mesmerizing. A Western as Celine might have written one." -Michael Greenberg, Times Literary Supplement of London

"The Drop Edge of Yonder, Wurlitzer's first novel in 24 years, is his best to date. It's the rare book that possesses not just big ideas, but the daring cleverness to pull them off." 5 / 6 Stars - Michael Miller, Time Out New York

"An epic Western that merges the unique narrative invention of [Wurlitzer's] early novels with the cinematic drift of his best scripts." -Dazed & Confused

"[A] psychedelic adventure... Ruminative and rip-roaring at once." - Entertainment Weekly

"[Wurlitzer's] vivid language has a poetic, almost magical, intensity. An atmospheric work that fuses the road novel and the western. [A] western [that] beautifully captures the glimmering maya of a gold-and-gun-and-sex-crazed frontier." -Brooklyn Rail

"Simply the most wonderful book I have read all year."
-Largehearted Boy

"Wurlitzer opens up his cold-blooded prose veins with the blade of the western genre, and something sinister and mystically unsettling gushes out." -Baltimore City Paper

"If Mel Brooks, William Burroughs and Jack Smith collaborated on a scenario for Ramona, then had a falling out and were replaced by Guy Maddin, the result might bear some resemblance to Rudolph Wurlitzer's tender, hair-raising, obscene and gloriously funny new novel, The Drop Edge of Yonder. Wurlitzer is back in top form and is, as always, a somber joy to read." -John Ashbery

"The Drop Edge of Yonder is a place where people can't afford their own feelings and survival counts for everything even if it isn't worth what it costs. It's Schoenberg playing on a whorehouse piano, a roulette wheel spinning on a melting ice floe, Sam Beckett with a six gun and a sack of rattlesnakes. Rudolph Wurlitzer wrings your heart like a chicken's neck while he shows you the cannibal in your bathroom mirror: our true American myth of origin." - Gary Indiana

"A wild adventure written by a bard who knows how to keep his audience spellbound by the campfire. And it's a subversive modern novel about the bounds of love and the discontents of civilized life. And it's also an invitation, delivered with an archaic smile, to meditate with a master on letting go." -Judith Thurman

"The Drop Edge of Yonder is a book you watch as you read, cast the film as you reread, and create a sequel as you sleep. A hypnotic yarn of poetry and mystical love." -Patti Smith

"I have never read anything like it. Every page transports the reader from the cerebral to the visceral and back again, until you start to feel that in the end there is no difference between the two." -Scott Spencer

"One of the most purely, deeply thrilling, inspired, and inspiring American novels I've read in many years." -Dennis Cooper

"The Drop Edge of Yonder is a book Fellini would have stolen and turned into a major film. He would have used all of Wurlitzer's flamboyant, surreal characters as well as his rich, endlessly imaginative language and storytelling abilities, and he’d swear it was all his. But it’s not. It’s Wurlitzer’s, and he has a sly, subversive humor that is inimitable. I enjoyed this book immensely." -Alan Arkin

"A wild ride into the heart of the California gold rush. Wurlitzer’s women make ‘Deadwood’ look like ‘Bonanza’.” -Robert Downey, Sr.

Rudolph Wurlitzer has published four novels - Nog, Flats, Quake, Slow Fade - and a non-fiction book, Hard Travel to Sacred Places, as well as three screenplays - Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Two Lane Blacktop, Walker. Among his twelve produced screenplays are Voyager, Little Buddha, and Candy Mountain, which he co-directed. He also wrote the libretto for the Philip Glass opera, In the Penal Colony, as well as several plays and numerous short stories and articles.

If you are affiliated with a media review outlet and would like to receive an advance reading copy of The Drop Edge of Yonder, contact Brian Obenauf at brian [at] twodollarradio.com. We can now provide either a galley or digital copy of the book.