Press & Reviews

The Making of Toro

• Detroit Free Press: The Bull Artist
• Toronto Globe and Mail: The Author as Metador
• The Village Voice: Write What You Know
• The Bookwoman
• Books like this are written only once or twice in a century. Thank God.
  -Hunter S. Thompson
• Already the author of one gonzo collection of travel misadventures (2000's Car Camping), Utah-based writer Mark Sundeen is garnering comparisons to archly ironic humorists David Sedaris and Dave Eggers with his second tome, The Making of Toro, but his comical boasting and defiant flights of hyperbolic fancy have more in common with another peer, Neal Pollack, as well as his most obvious influence, the great Hunter S. Thompson. Far more interesting than the cliché-ridden tales we usually get in books about glamorous, manly pursuits like climbing Everest or diving down to the Titanic, and Sundeen's wonderfully dry and evocative prose is a joy to read as he takes us behind the scenes to the dark alleys where many adventurers would never think to look.
  --Jim DeRogatis
• A skewed travelogue, in which the line between a gritty reality and a chimerical fantasy is warmly blurred.
  –Publishers Weekly
• A bizarre chronicle of the author's failed attempts to write the book we are, in fact, reading. There is an absurd postmodern slant to all of this, shades of the film Adaptation, or maybe it's just that, as Sundeen reasons, every blockbuster needs a making-of documentary. Either way, it's funny, surreal, and thoroughly one-of-a-kind, an exciting adventure about a grand misadventure.
  -Booklist
• Fans of John Kennedy Toole's comic masterpiece, The Confederacy of Dunces, will find a new hero within the pages of The Making of Toro.
  -KFOG San Francisco

• New York Times: Nowhere, Man
• Salt Lake City Weekly
• A riotous, beautiful, totally original road novel masquerading as a travel book. Sundeen's America, comprised of equal parts Gorgeous and Awful, absolutely shimmers with life. The prose is pure, wild, naive, and poetic; the characters leap off the page in their dunderheadedness and sincerity. A brilliant and auspicious debut.
  —George Saunders
• A stunningly wonderful writer. Sundeen's prose is sparse but the images he creates are alive and infinite. This is a book to be savored and remembered.
  —Hubert Selby Jr
• Housepainter Mark Sundeen, 22, tells of hopping in his ramshackle station wagon, along or with some of his more eccentric family members, and hightailing it out of his Southern California neighborhood for various godforsaken, fascinating parts of the American West. Sundeen, via his faux-naive authorial persona, makes many delightfully sly comments on the pretentious rich inhabitants of Telluride, tourists chasing Native American "spirituality" and the true meaning of the term "National Recreation Area."
  —Laura Miller, Salon
  
• Every generation needs its own road novel; for [this generation], Car Camping is it. You'll find many reasons to like Car Camping, most of them having to do with author Mark Sundeen's workmanlike voice. It's a voice that rarely resorts to an exclamation point and is never cute or precious. It's a voice that seems resigned but eventually beguiles the reader with a hard-bitten resilience. Best of all, there's the distinct sense of a good young writer emerging—Sundeen's is a voice you'll want to hear again.
  —Portland Oregonian
• All sorts of places along the back roads and all sorts of interesting characters.
  —National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation: Summer Book List
• Mark Sundeen has as many great road-trip yarns as he has miles on his odometer.
  —Playboy
• This is travel literature done DIY style, with Mark Sundeen criss-crossing the Southwest behind the wheel of his beat-up Subaru wagon in pursuit of a place where he can afford to be "himself." He offers up his commentary on a part of the American experience that never makes it to prime time and he has some sound, sharp explanations as to why that might be. Car Camping is funny, and Sundeen's wanderlust is infectious.
  —Bust Magazine
• Sundeen succeeds in exposing the small-town and drifter lifestyles that are as much a part of the West as the glitz of Los Angeles or unabashed tourist enticements of Las Vegas.
  —Salt Lake Tribune

Profiles

• "Westward Ho!" The Easy Reader
• "Roadside Attractions" Stanford Magazine
• To The Best of Our Knowledge, Wisconsin Public Radio
• CNN Transcript, in which I tour the Hyperion sewage treatment plant and force the reporter into a kayak on the Los Angeles River.

Buy The Making of Toro at Powells.com, an independent bookstore.
Buy Car Camping at Powells.com.