The negatives are not getting as much mainstream press, like in magazines, but I feel like I’m doing fine. Jessie Duke, who edited it, and read it first, said: “If Trainspotting was a 10 in the whole make you feel awful scale, your book is at least an eight. I liked that it was set in the early-2000s in America but didn’t culminate in some big 9/11 deus ex machina. Flashbacks of two freshman nerds broadcasting Pulp and Blues Explosion videos, interviews with random friends, and Titanic , after midnight to maybe a handful of dorm-dwellers.

We also have a pact that if we find a stash of cash when we’re planting crops, we’ll put it back in the ground. There was also a tour-only novella, entitled Seasons Loving Nothing, that was available on the UK dates. Adjusting to the country grind has been a constant dance of improvisation, but they’ve seen success.A kid walking in the Hard Fifty garden today would see chia, dill, basil, six types of tomatoes, 10 types of peppers, pumpkins, summer squash, zucchini, snap peas, pinto beans, quinoa, strawberries, mint, sage, corn, Brussels sprouts, lettuce, broccoli and spinach. But he’s tough… he’s had to be, weathered for years as a genuine artist in a world where consumption is valued by its immediacy and contemplative reflection is a fusty notion that withers lest it can be abridged by a Tweet. By 2009, though, Duke, Christian and Gnade (who had quit the Mercury to tour and work part time for Microcosm) were ready to leave town.

At this point, this is such a part of who I am, I’d have to become a different person to do something different. This comes after what sounds like a very stressful move after the owners of the farm where he lived decided to sell it.

As Gnade tells stories about his upbringing in San Diego (the setting for a lot of his other books as well) and his travels across the country, the real stars include Cactus Candy, the Tuna Melt, the Wendy’s Frosty, Nacho Cheese Doritos, and so on. He says, “Every single one of those interactions—I’ve left feeling stronger and more energetic and more hopeful. Then we read this blurb from San Diegan Julia Dixon Evans, author of How to Set Yourself on Fire : “Adam Gnade deftly captures the starkness of wading through life on the crux of happiness or despair, never fully falling in to either, and he does so with the same dreamy, exquisite detail by which he serves up meal after meal.