Join us for an evening with authors
Amanda Fortini & Jeff Morley to discuss their contributions to the new anthology,
250 Great American Things
in conversation with Gus O’Connor
to be held at Solid State Books on H St. NE
Tickets with AND without a book are available here!
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
Amanda Fortini is a columnist at County Highway. She divides her time between Livingston, Montana, and Las Vegas, Nevada — about which she is currently writing a book of essays, Flamingo Road. Her essays have been widely anthologized, including in Best American Political Writing and Best American Travel Writing. From 2021 to 2022, she did a nine-month flower essence apprenticeship and got certified as a practitioner.
Jeff Morley is a longtime journalist for the a contributor to the book. He's also the editor of the JFK Facts and the author of a trilogy of spies: Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA; The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton; and Scorpions’ Dance: The President, the Spymaster and Watergate.
Gus O'Connor is the Associate Editor of Panamerica Books.