In a Tweet: a post-apocalyptic, coming-of-age road trip novel. Our teenage protagonist awakes to find himself amidst a military evacuation of the United States, unsure of where the populace has vanished to or how many have been taken into custody. He escapes into an empty America with a handful of friends, pitting responsibility against sanity in a desperate attempt to survive--after succumbing to the despair of an unknown, unanswerable existence. Completed at the age of 18, this seminal novel remains the foundation for his impressive body of work. "I wrote this book so I didn't have to deal with being an adolescent in the Midwest. Looking at it over a decade later, I think it's kind of cute and naive...Yet there's an element of poetry and I-won't-be-young-forever panic that pressurizes the prose in a way I doubt I could reproduce. Influenced by Patti, Rimbaud, Hunter, and Burroughs, this is what I came up with between the ages of 15 and 18, raging via allegory against being stuck in a backwater town. Why would total strangers read this book? Well for one, I was writing about sex when I hadn't had it yet. But if you're looking for a more intellectual answer, I'd say the book captures the doom and uncertainty of spending the rest of your young life in a wasteland pretty convincing." --Tod Crouch