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250 Great American Things
250 Great American Things by County Highway
by County Highway, David Samuels, Walter Kirn, Anne Fadiman, Ian Frazier, Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, Meaghan Garvey, Lee Clay Johnson
 
Event with Lee Clay Johnson, Gary Fisketjon,
David Samuels, and Ryan Baesemann
Thursday, July 23rd
Signing at 5:00 pm
Conversation at 5:30 pm


Only books purchased from Lemuria will be signed.

Paperback Original. Signed.
Price: $25.00


Availability: Pre-Order
Qty:

Description
 
Minneapolis, MN: Hard Cider Press | Consortium Book Sales (July 4, 2026)

Paperback original with decorative french flaps. Signed.

New.

In the spirit of our founding father, Mark Twain, County Highway is honoring the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by gathering a raft of some of America’s finest essayists, humorists, fiction writers, and other prose stylists and wise-asses to remind us of what makes America great. The answers, some deadpan, and others only mildly tongue-in-cheek, include lawn-mowers, gas grills, Hanna-Barbera cartoons, cowboy boots, catcher’s mitts, light-bulbs, hairspray, chicken-wire fencing, and 242 other entries in what is sure to be the most amusing and least-tiresome tribute to a nation that occasionally commemorates the past by staging gaudy parades or engaging in bouts of solemn introspection but thrives most of the time on forgetting its history and making new stuff.

Given the bitter political divisions that render Americans capable of agreeing on anything of importance, we don’t claim to list the “greatest” American things, nor do we rank them in any order besides the alphabetical. Rather, the greatness of each entry will speak for itself, and for the nation that we have built together — by solving problems that needed solving, through flashes of off-kilter genius and intuition, and by kidding around.

County Highway is a magazine about America in the form of a 19th-century newspaper. It features reports on the political and spiritual crises that are gripping our country and their deeper cultural and historical sources; regular columns about agriculture, civil liberties, animals, herbal medicine, and living off the grid, mentally and physically; essays about literature and art; and an entire section devoted to music.

Lee Clay Johnson, the award-winning author of our first Panamerica title, Bloodline, as well as a contributor to 250 Great American Things.

Gary Fisketjon, fiction editor of County Highway and a contributor to 250 Great American Things.

David Samuels, editor-in-chief of County Highway and co-editor of 250 Great American Things.

Ryan Baesemann, managing editor of County Highway and co-editor of 250 Great American Things.

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