Desert Oracle
Volume 1: Strange True Tales from the American Southwest
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4.0 • 6 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The cult-y pocket-size field guide to the strange and intriguing secrets of the Mojave—its myths and legends, outcasts and oddballs, flora, fauna, and UFOs—becomes the definitive, oracular book of the desert
For the past five years, Desert Oracle has existed as a quasi-mythical, quarterly periodical available to the very determined only by subscription or at the odd desert-town gas station or the occasional hipster boutique, its canary-yellow-covered, forty-four-page issues handed from one curious desert zealot to the next, word spreading faster than the printers could keep up with. It became a radio show, a podcast, a live performance. Now, for the first time—and including both classic and new, never-before-seen revelations—Desert Oracle has been bound between two hard covers and is available to you.
Straight out of Joshua Tree, California, Desert Oracle is “The Voice of the Desert”: a field guide to the strange tales, singing sand dunes, sagebrush trails, artists and aliens, authors and oddballs, ghost towns and modern legends, musicians and mystics, scorpions and saguaros, out there in the sand. Desert Oracle is your companion at a roadside diner, around a campfire, in your tent or cabin (or high-rise apartment or suburban living room) as the wind and the coyotes howl outside at night.
From journal entries of long-deceased adventurers to stray railroad ad copy, and musings on everything from desert flora, rumored cryptid sightings, and other paranormal phenomena, Ken Layne's Desert Oracle collects the weird and the wonderful of the American Southwest into a single, essential volume.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Layne (Dignity) delivers a playful potpourri of lore, obscure facts, geographic meditations, and conservationist advocacy in this eclectic collection of desert-themed essays. The author presents the desert as a home worthy of protecting and suggests it is a source of meaning. "There is purpose waiting out here, for anyone who comes in honest pursuit of it," he writes in the introduction, and the essays that follow tell how he and others found such purpose. An empathetic essay on "wandering philosopher" Edward Abbey imagines wilderness as "a haven for outlaws," and essays on UFOs and the Yucca Man tackle myths with humor and curiosity. Several pieces provide something of a cultural history of the American Southwest, covering the legacy of Marty Robbins's western music, William Burroughs's time in Los Alamos, and the cultish "Solar Lodge." Layne concludes with a poetically pitched message to keep the desert "a wild, open landscape available for our encounters with the mysterious and the divine." With his succinct, descriptive, narrative-driven prose, Layne creates a fascinating homage to the beauty of an often unforgiving landscape.
