“A funny, moving, rousing collection, greater than the sum of its excellent parts.” 
—New York Times Book Review
Edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey, State by State is a panoramic portrait of America and an appreciation of all fifty states (and Washington, D.C.) by fifty-one of the most acclaimed writers in the nation. Contributors include renowned and bestselling authors such as Louise Erdrich, Jonathan Franzen, Ann Patchett, Anthony Bourdain, William T. Vollmann, S.E. Hinton, Dave Eggers, Myla Goldberg, Rick Moody, and Alexander Payne. Inspired by the Depression-era WPA guides and awarded an “A” grade by Entertainment Weekly, these delightful essays on the American character deliver “the full plumage of American life, in all its riotous glory” (The New Yorker).

State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America

History

Wilsey, Sean

Weiland, Matt

Americas

Ecco

Hello, Molly!: A Memoir

A candid, compulsively readable, hilarious, and heartbreaking memoir of resilience and redemption by comedic genius Molly Shannon At age four, Molly Shannon's world was shattered when she lost her mother, baby sister, and cousin in a car accident with her father at the wheel. Held together by her tender and complicated relationship with her grieving father, Molly was raised in a permissive household where her gift for improvising and role-playing blossomed alongside the fearlessness that would lead her to become a celebrated actress. From there, Molly ventured into the wider world of New York and Los Angeles show business, where she created her own opportunities and developed her daring and empathetic comedy. Filled with behind-the-scenes stories involving everyone from Whitney Houston to Adam Sandler to Monica Lewinsky, many told for the first time here, Hello, Molly! spans Molly's time on Saturday Night Live--where she starred alongside Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler, Cheri Oteri, Tracy Morgan, and Jimmy Fallon, among many others. At the same time, it explores with humor and candor her struggle to come to terms with the legacy of her father, a man who both fostered her gifts and drive and was left with the impossible task of raising his kids alone after the loss of her mother. Witty, winning, and told with tremendous energy and heart, Hello, Molly!, written with Sean Wilsey, sheds new and revelatory light on the life and work of one of our most talented and free-spirited performers.

Biographies & Memoirs

Shannon, Molly

Arts & Literature

A New York Times bestseller A candid, compulsively readable, hilarious, and heartbreaking memoir of resilience and redemption by comedic genius Molly Shannon At age four, Molly Shannon's world was shattered when she lost her mother, baby sister, and cousin in a car accident with her father at the wheel. Held together by her tender and complicated relationship with her grieving father, Molly was raised in a permissive household where her gift for improvising and role-playing blossomed alongside the fearlessness that would lead her to become a celebrated actress. From there, Molly ventured into the wider world of New York and Los Angeles show business, where she created her own opportunities and developed her daring and empathetic comedy. Filled with behind-the-scenes stories involving everyone from Whitney Houston to Adam Sandler to Monica Lewinsky, many told for the first time here, Hello, Molly! spans Molly's time on Saturday Night Live--where she starred alongside Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler, Cheri Oteri, Tracy Morgan, and Jimmy Fallon, among many others. At the same time, it explores with humor and candor her struggle to come to terms with the legacy of her father, a man who both fostered her gifts and drive and was left with the impossible task of raising his kids alone after the loss of her mother. Witty, winning, and told with tremendous energy and heart, Hello, Molly!, written with Sean Wilsey, sheds new and revelatory light on the life and work of one of our most talented and free-spirited performers.

Oh the Glory of It All

Oh The Glory Of It All

Leaders & Notable People

Penguin Putnam~trade

"In the beginning we were happy. And we were always excessive. So in the beginning we were happy to excess." With these opening lines Sean Wilsey takes us on an exhilarating tour of life in the strangest, wealthiest, and most grandiose of families.
Sean's blond-bombshell mother (one of the thinly veiled characters in Armistead Maupin's bestselling Tales of the City) is a 1980s society-page staple, regularly entertaining Black Panthers and movie stars in her marble and glass penthouse, "eight hundred feet in the air above San Francisco; an apartment at the top of a building at the top of a hill: full of light, full of voices, full of windows full of water and bridges and hills." His enigmatic father uses a jet helicopter to drop Sean off at the video arcade and lectures his son on proper hygiene in public restrooms, "You should wash your hands first, before you use the urinal. Not after. Your penis isn't dirty. But your hands are."
When Sean, "the kind of child who sings songs to sick flowers," turns nine years old, his father divorces his mother and marries her best friend. Sean's life blows apart. His mother first invites him to commit suicide with her, then has a "vision" of salvation that requires packing her Louis Vuitton luggage and traveling the globe, a retinue of multiracial children in tow. Her goal: peace on earth (and a Nobel Prize). Sean meets Indira Gandhi, Helmut Kohl, Menachem Begin, and the pope, hoping each one might come back to San Francisco and persuade his father to rejoin the family. Instead, Sean is pushed out of San Francisco and sent spiraling through five high schools, till he finally lands at an unorthodox reform school cum "therapeutic community," in Italy.
With its multiplicity of settings and kaleidoscopic mix of preoccupations-sex, Russia, jet helicopters, seismic upheaval, boarding schools, Middle Earth, skinheads, home improvement, suicide, skateboarding, Sovietology, public transportation, massage, Christian fundamentalism, dogs, Texas, global thermonuclear war, truth, evil, masturbation, hope, Bethlehem, CT, eventual salvation (abridged list)—Oh the Glory of It All is memoir as bildungsroman as explosion.

Humor & Entertainment

Penguin Publishing Group

A founding editor of McSweeney's documents his experiences of growing up in an eccentric society family, which was marked by his father's infidelity with his mother's best friend, his mother's post-depression international travels, their encounters with numerous political figures, and more. Simultaneous.

Penguin Audio

Penguin

From reviews of the hardcover edition:
“More Curious begins by making you wonder what kind of book it is, exactly, and ends by reminding you that categories are nonsense when you’re enjoying something this much.” —Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad
“Mr. Wilsey can write in a range of emotional octaves, moving from the comic to the philosophical to the streetwise with ease, while putting body language on his prose to give the reader an almost synesthetic sense of what he’s saying.” —Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
“More Curious captures the dizzying absurdity of contemporary America.” —Vanity Fair
“Sean Wilsey’s witty essays from his cross-country adventures form a portrait of the weird side of contemporary America.” —Los Angeles Times
“When Wilsey is at his best, and he often is in More Curious, his prose has a barely contained energy that makes his work both informative and entertaining. And often, whether his subject is rats or NASA or skateboarding or soccer, that work is provocative and huge-hearted.” —Alex Lemon, Dallas Morning News
“Sometimes he’s funny and self-deprecating and sometimes he’s somber; sometimes his scope is as sweeping as our country, and other times it’s as narrow as Buzz Aldrin’s taste in wristwatches. There’s one through-line from beginning to end, though: those careful, thoughtful, perfect sentences.” —Alison Hallett, Portland Mercury
“Generation-defining . . . a welcome chronicle of our age.” —David Kurlander, San Francisco Bay Guardian
Now in paperback, with a bonus essay not included in the hardcover edition, here is Sean Wilsey’s celebrated collection of essays on the glory and misery, the beauty and absurdity of contemporary America.

More Curious

Literature & Fiction

Essays & Correspondence

University of Texas Press

A founding editor of McSweeney's documents his experiences of growing up in an eccentric society family, which was marked by his father's infidelity with his mother's best friend, his mother's post-depression international travels, their encounters with numerous political figures, and more.

Regional U.S.

Penguin Press HC, The

In More Curious, Sean Wilsey travels across the U.S., from the launchpad at Cape Canaveral, to the isolated artists' enclave of Marfa, Texas, to the boardrooms and ballrooms of post–9/11 New York City. Wherever he is, Wilsey captures his surroundings with the precision of a photographer and the raw grace of a skateboarder (he's an amateur practitioner of both arts). And his eye always finds an unrivaled intensity of detail: here, and only here, will a reader be privy to the Dostoyevskian whiff of Marfa's fugitive underbelly, the unsung delights of a skater rag's cooking column, the exact amount of time elapsed since the soundwaves of a long-lost, legendary World Cup broadcast passed out of our solar system. These essays—originally published in Vanity Fair, GQ, McSweeney's, and elsewhere—comprise nearly fifteen years of Wilsey's most vital work on the glory and the misery, the beauty and absurdity of contemporary America.

United States

McSweeney's

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Wilsey, Sean. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Wilsey, Sean

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Wilsey, Sean. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America

Hello, Molly!: A Memoir

Hello, Molly!: A Memoir

Oh The Glory Of It All

Oh the Glory of It All

Oh the Glory of It All

Oh the Glory of It All

More Curious

Oh the Glory of It All

More Curious