“Claire Vaye Watkins’ first novel, Gold Fame Citrus. The novel is a nihilistic reckoning with the exploded fantasia of the West, set in a devastated near future where the trees have all died, blueberries are sold in narcotic quantities at exorbitant prices, and a ‘dune sea’ called the ‘Amargosa’ is steadily sanding away much of California’s geography.”
“For a book about a dry future, Watkins writes in a torrent, her language flooding the psychedelic landscapes of her ruined California. It’s a book that could prove prophetic, and one already terrifyingly expressive of our cultural moment in which the slow-motion disaster of Western drought — a disaster more than a century in the making — has finally become un-ignorably visible.”