Styled after classic American road novels, Grant Sisk's A Thousand Miles Out of My Mind reads like a cross between Charles Portis's Norwood and Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. A high-torque comic journey written with terrific verve, it features a cast of outcasts from the lonelier parts of the Greater Southwest and mile after mile of metaphorical asphalt. As with the best of its predecessors, the true subject of Sisk's novel is America itself.--Nick Norwood, Director of the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians