Mark Sundeen

Mark Sundeen is the author of The Man Who Quit Money, to be published by Riverhead/Penguin in 2012. His nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Outside, National Geographic Adventure, the Believer, and elsewhere. His previous books are Car Camping (HarperCollins, 2000), The Making of Toro (Simon & Schuster, 2003), and North By Northwestern (St. Martin’s, 2010, co-written with Sig Hansen), which was a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. He has taught fiction and nonfiction at the MFA creative writing programs at the University of New Mexico and Western Connecticut State University, as well as the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference. He lives in Montana and Utah.

Photo by Anna Hrnjak

WE walked into the village around dusk, but with the fog pouring down the dirt streets, it could have been anytime. It was cold, and I could hardly see across the concrete plaza. The Catholic church had been cleaved by an earthquake, the gap between its two halves now spanned with sheets of plywood, but that didn’t stop people from praying in the dank cavern on a floor littered with boughs of long green pine needles.

Our accommodations were a municipal building, a cinder block structure around a courtyard with a fountain that didn’t work and an ash heap where skinny mutts gnawed leftovers. We were to sleep on the tile floor of a room with no furniture and a nonfunctioning light bulb hanging from a wire. I recognized the place from Hollywood thrillers: this was where the narco-cartel tortured its enemies.
Read the story here.

Here

The book is out and has found its way to the bestseller charts of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Read an excerpt here.