From “one of the most significant U.S. writers” (David Foster Wallace), an investigation of Yucca Mountain and human destruction in Las Vegas. When John D’Agata helps his mother move to Las Vegas one summer, he begins to follow a story about the federal government’s plan to store high-level nuclear waste at a place called Yucca Mountain, a desert range near the city of Las Vegas. Bearing witness to the parade of scientific, cultural, and political facts that give shape to Yucca’s story, D’Agata keeps the six tenets of reporting in mind―Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How―arranging his own investigation around each vital question. Yet as the contradictions inherent in Yucca’s story are revealed, D’Agata’s investigation turns inevitably personal. He finds himself investigating the death of a teenager who jumps off the tower of the Stratosphere Hotel, a boy whom D’Agata believes he spoke with before his suicide. Here is the work of a penetrating thinker whose startling portrait of a mountain in the desert compels a reexamination of the future of human life. An innovative essayist (Halls of Fame, 2001) and dynamic anthologist, (The Lost Origins of the Essay, 2009), D’Agata brings his syncopated, collaged, and devastatingly deadpan style to a finely calibrated and nervy inquiry into civic follies. When his mother moves to Las Vegas, D’Agata becomes curious about the collision of science, politics, and corruption behind the ludicrous federal plan to transport deadly nuclear waste cross-country to unstable, porous Yucca Mountain. While trying to collect the outrageous facts about this doomed project, he also gathers troubling information about Nevada’s atomic-bomb test sites and Las Vegas’ dwindling water supply and its standing as the nation’s suicide capital. Shifting between a young man’s leap to his death from the Stratosphere Hotel and the absurd effort to design signage to warn future earthlings away from the proposed radioactive mountain, he sheds light on myriad delusions, scams, and lies. D’Agata’s distinctive narrative rhythms, melancholy wit, and keen perception of the social facade and the toxic darkness it conceals make for an acid test, and a ballad about the endless enigmas of humankind. --Donna Seaman "D’Agata has an encyclopedic understanding of the form’s intricate artistry. Moreover, he is a serious thinker who regularly lays down stylish, intelligent sentences.... an engrossing story and an often impressive piece of reporting." ― The New York Times Book Review "[E]xquisite.... This is what, at its best, contemporary narrative nonfiction aspires to, a story that, like the novel, operates on many levels at once." ― David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times "A writer of rare intelligence and artistry . . . John D’Agata is redefining the modern American essay." ― Annie Dillard Advance praise for About a Mountain: “John D’Agata is a sublime technician of language and a writer of the gravest moral concerns. Beneath a blizzard of fact he forges a lament for nothing less than the future of civilization and, just for good measure, reengineers the possibilities for literature itself. It’s a brilliant, sorrowful book that shows us, with piercing, lyric detail, how vulnerable our most basic assumptions really are. Here is the literary essay raised to the highest form of art.” ―Ben Marcus, author of Notable American Women “John D’Agata, in this brilliantly unsettling new book, picks up a thread, or several threads, and follows them, stays with them, letting each lead him deeper and deeper into uncharted territory, until by the end we are in the dark heart of America. Utterly amazing.” ―Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and The Ticking Is the Bomb John D’Agata is the author of About a Mountain , Halls of Fame , and editor of The Next American Essay and The Lost Origins of the Essay . He teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where he lives.