Arizona Time: A Novel and Five Shorts

Dry heat. Drifting sand. Broken people.

In Arizona Time, they weave into a hypnotic haze where the ghost of Tom Mix shares the secrets of the West, an unlikely love takes root, and a murderous drug-dealing backpacker synthesizes marijuana and metaphysics into a philosophy for the modern age.

Arizona Time is set in the post-frontier American West, a landscape shaped by Larry McMurtry, Breaking Bad, Sam Shepherd, and Leslie Marmon Silko. It is a classic Western, but like no other Western before.

Struggling photographer Ponder Lee Catan returns to Arizona after heartbreak and finds counsel in strange places. Isabelle Emerson, a glamorous New York art gallery manager, flees west after traumatic horror. Val Anglemann, scion of a long line of frontiersmen, nephew of a U.S. senator, and outdoorsman unhinged by drugs, seduces himself into creating a final stand.

“Highly original and studded with gorgeous writing, Arizona Time is a warning that if, per Thomas Paine, we have it in our power to begin the world again, we must first be willing to spill blood, suffer unbearable loss, and learn to live with some hard-earned, poorly healed scars. For the reader, it’s very much a trip worth taking.” –Antioch Review