At Speed

W. Scott Olsen is a professor of English at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. In addition to being editor in chief of Ascent, a literary magazine of fiction, essays, and poetry, he is the author of several books, including Gravity, The Allure of Distance: Essays on the Act of Travel, as well as the editor of several anthologies, including A Year in Place.

• Acknowledgements  ixThe Climb  1The Road in Winter  31Mids  49The Other Road in Winter  61From the Notebooks  73What May Be Coming  85

"Olsen's journeys across America, with no companion except the radio in his battered Jeep, are splendidly evocative of the American landscape from frozen prairie to subtropical sea. With playful irony and poetic insight, he shows that long-distance driving, far from being 'just one long, boring drive' as a gas station clerk warns him, can be a rich source of imaginative meaning."—Leo Damrosch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University and National Book Award finalist in Nonfiction for Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius "Reading At Speed is like opening a road map to have it come alive in your hands."—Peter Chilson, winner of the AWP Nonfiction Award for Riding The Demon: On The Road in West Africa "It's not where he goes, but what he sees and how he glowingly describes the scenes that make this book a pleasure to read."—Booklist "Describing several trips, ranging the continent from Death Valley to Kansas City to the Alaska Highway, Olsen stirs our own memories of the road, that sense of the leaving and returning to the places we have known. . . . His writing is spirited, smooth and fast." —Ray Vandersall, High Country News "Writing in the great tradition of American road books, W. Scott Olsen has produced an engaging set of essays which hurtle forward on sheer momentum. . . . By narrating his sojourns down the road, Olsen effectively drops the reader into the passenger seat. . . . When you have finished the last page of the last long drive, you'll find yourself reaching to unbuckle a seat belt, turning to Olsen and saying, 'Thanks for the ride.'"—Naton Leslie, Mid-American Review "[Olsen] has the rare ability to catch cultural highlights and report them verbally by merely traveling through the vast expanses of the Midwest. Bu the narrative does not remain confined to it. . . . What makes this narrative alluring is that the author manages to shed a different light on many places he visits and takes away the cliché of tediousness with which these places are often associated. . . . This travel book is a good read, and I emphatically recommend it to people interested in places off the beaten track."—North Dakota Quarterly