OFFLINE

A college dropout smashes his phone, pockets forty-three dollars and a swollen eye, and boards a Greyhound east. He is going cheap and far, and he does not much care where. On the road he meets Mira, and loses her before he understands what she was. Put off the bus in a Hill Country town called Helms, he washes dishes through a long summer among people who keep their own counsel and men who believe the lizards are older than the rocks. Then what the town has been agreeing not to know turns out to have his name in it. OFFLINE is a debut novella about work, witness, and what a man carries in his pocket across half a country before he learns what it is. For readers of Willy Vlautin and Denis Johnson's Train Dreams.