About
Flash-fiction master Grant Faulkner and punk photographer Gail Butensky have partnered to create this unique narrative made up of stories alongside edge-of-the-world photography.
The book tells of two lovers taking a reckless, searching road trip through the American West. Dawn is a photographer who captures desert landscapes. Jonny drives just to drive, running away from the end of time or running toward the end of time, looking for a home even as his restlessness overtakes him.
By turns funny, poignant, and heartbreaking, something out there in the distance is big in emotions while brief in words. An extraordinary collaboration between word and image, Dawn and Jonny’s journey transports us to a place, achingly familiar, populated by love, loss, and wonder.
Praise
“‘You can’t take a bad photo of a highway’—my favorite quote from this beautiful little book about two lovers on the run from death. something out there in the distance reads like a song, and like a song
it will echo inside you long after you’ve finished it.”
—Molly Giles, author of Life Span: Impressions of a Lifetime Spent Crossing and Recrossing the Golden Gate Bridge
“The shape of this book is small but powerful, uncommon but familiar because it is about the unimaginable gap between breathing and dreaming that is grief. Grief literature is trending for a reason, because we are in a state of great loss and transformation. This work aims a bleary eye on the land, the sky, palm trees, and chlorinated pools and then into a single pair of bodies, restless, regretful, earnest, gorgeous, ashamed, and
in love—then it waves good-bye to what will never be again.”
—Venita BlackBurn, author of Dead in Long Beach, California
“The book’s unique shape is further enlivened by the narrative’s unusual (for flash fiction) long-form story. Faulkner’s spare and expert prose tells a single story in an almost novel-like (or highway-like) fashion instead of in the flash genre’s more classic story collection form. Butensky’s photographs operate as the roadside stops of flash fiction, her visual story collection dotted throughout Faulkner’s longer-form tale.”
—K.C. Mead-Brewer, Smokelong Quarterly