Books

Car Camping

• 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
• Exhilarating reading . . . very funny . . . the scenery he describes best in these wide-open spaces consists largely of trailer parks, junkyards, campgrounds and ”recreational areas.” Here there are no larger-than-life characters, no sinner-saints or inspired madmen — just listless, marginal dreamers, scavengers who seem to have become deluded by some long-forgotten notion of the desert, only to find themselves eking out a hardscrabble existence among the detritus of those who’ve been this way before. -New York Times
• A smart, fresh-eyed, youthful journey through the parts of the States that don’t usually make it into books. Sundeen casts a sharp eye over underprivileged Americans, children of the hippie generation and victims of the American nightmare. Nihilistic and New Age, this is a fresh view of the America we often overlook. -Sunday Times (London)
• 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
• Summer Reading List,2000, NPR’s Talk of the Nation
• 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
• 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
• Car Camping is set to be a cult classic in the manner of Jack Kerouac’s visionary On the Road. -Birmingham Post (UK)
• What is so refreshing about Car Camping is its detachment. Rather than the “self-absorbed” beats, Sundeen aligns himself with the Californian tradition of gritty writers like John Fante and James M. Cain. He shares their interest in reality, in people on the fringes who don’t appear dramatic or overly unusual–the petty criminals and barflys, the everyman and woman–thus bringing Nowheresville, USA, to life. —Dazed & Confused (UK)
• There are, among Sundeen’s youthful celebration so of liberty, incidents of pathos, of fearful insecurity and failure which transforms this semi autobiography into much more than a travelogue. —What’s on in Birmingham
• A pure pleasure of a debut. —The Scotsman
• Mark Sundeen’s road-trip turns out to be hugely compelling… His observations are keen and insightful, his wit as dry as the Mojave Desert. —The List

The Making of Toro

• Books like this are only written once or twice a century. Thank God. —Hunter S. Thompson
• Top ten books of 2003. Part travelogue, part romance, part send-up of literary fashions and wholly the mark of the quirkiest memoirist since David Sedaris. —Detroit Free Press
• A wonderful, sarcastic take on the concept of author as artist. What an imagination, and what an ego for his author-protagonist! What a riot! —Library Journal (starred review)
• “My art is my life, and versa vice,” proclaims Travis LaFrance, Sundeen’s ever-confident, fictional alter-ego, in this amusing, chivalric tongue-in-cheek story of a writer set on acquainting everyday readers with Mexican bullfighting. After receiving little recognition for his previous book on falconry (which, as Sundeen explains, “is about birds only insomuch as the falcons serve as a metaphor for my flight toward freedom”), the author attempts to redeem himself by unveiling bullfighting’s rugged, fiery ritual. The motivated yanqui (Spanglish for “Yankee”) buys a one-way ticket to Mexico City, expecting to fall in love with the tradition of bullfighting, the captivating beauty of Mexican women and the splendor of one of the most acclaimed capitals of the bullfighting world. Instead, he finds grimy buildings, cybercafes and Domino’s Pizza-sponsored bullrings, which look more like circuses than a noble institution’s holy ground. But Sundeen refuses to come to terms with a deflated dream. With each misguided attempt to find bullfighting’s heart and soul, LaFrance uses a quixotic idealism to convert reality (e.g., an undercooked drumstick served in a dingy corner diner) to what could be (an exotic delicacy, served only to the most esteemed of guests). It’s a skewed travelogue, in which the line between a gritty reality and a chimerical fantasy is warmly blurred. -Publishers Weekly
• Here’s an odd one. Sundeen is commissioned to write a book about bullfighting in Mexico. Despite his near-total lack of knowledge on the subject, he plunges headlong into the assignment, only to find it impossible to complete. Instead of the grandeur and splendor he expected to find–he has at least read his Hemingway–Sundeen discovers a sport (or perhaps lifestyle) that might better lend itself to a comic travelogue. Unable to complete his mission, the author calls upon his alter ego, Travis LaFrance (under whose name Sundeen has published Fun with Falconry), to finish the book. What results is 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
• Combining the self-deprecating wit of David Sedaris and the literary gamesmanship of Dave Eggers . . . fabulously entertaining . . . The Making of Toro is a glorious mess, the tale of a hapless quest. -Outside
• He depicts a circuitous problem for any emerging U.S. author aspiring to the life of Hemingway or Jon Krakauer. It’s impossible, misguided or, at any rate, imperialistic. There they are, increasingly loathed for their nation’s global agenda, seeking adventure that might fuel their contributions to the culture, only to be confronted (and disappointed) by their own cultural dominance. A wry lament for the kind of honest, authentically American experience that just “isn’t good enough for books” any more. -Toronto Globe and Mail
• A brilliant performance: the making of a book that never existed by an author who is his imaginary double. The hilarious novel brings into into collision the old school of the great comedians of the New Yorker (Perelman, Benchley, etc..) and the very modern gonzo journalism.-Le Figaro (France)
• A saving grace for the literary world. -Standard (France)
• A literary entertainment as produced only by novelists conscious of the capacity of words. Mark Sundeen is gifted. He writes lines with the teeth of a saw, full of spice, madly enjoyable. -Sud Ouest (France)
• There’s nothing romantic about Sundeen’s vision of bullfighting and its macho practitioners. Addicted to wandering off the beaten path, he’d much rather chat with the folks who dispose of the carcasses afterwards. [This] story and many others like it are 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