University of New Mexico Press

This fully revised and updated edition of Peter B. Dedek's classic is a thorough dive into the history and current delights of America's Road in time for its 100th birthday!In 2026, Route 66 reached a major mile marker: it has celebrated its one-hundredth anniversary. Commissioned by the federal government as US Highway 66 in 1926, Route 66 has weathered many bumps in the road. The old road even survived a near-death experience in 1985 when it was bypassed by interstate highways and officially decommissioned only to rise again as a historic landmark and symbol of the independent American spirit and America’s love affair with the automobile. Although much along the historic highway has been lost over the years, Route 66 still has a lot to offer. Old motels, vacant gas stations, vintage restaurants, and decayed tourist traps have been preserved and transformed into sites of reverence and memory. In the past few decades, the highway has evolved into a linear community, a heritage corridor, an American route of pilgrimage sustained by a series of preserved landmarks visited by tourists from all over the world. More recently built museums, visitors’ centers, roadside parks, and Route 66–themed businesses offer tourists the chance to experience myriad aspects of the highway and the ideas it represents. This book examines the many meanings of Route 66 and how they relate to its past, present, and future. More an idea than a highway, Route 66 symbolizes a sense of freedom and benign rebellion against the constrained routines of modern life, a place where one can wander and live in the moment. The old road also represents community, wholesome enjoyment, and an entrepreneurial, independent spirit. Route 66 is a road of stories and legends.

A heartfelt look at the state of modern fly-fishing and the challenges fishers will face in the coming decades. Ron Dungan, like many fly-fishers, can be obsessive. Although decades of fishing trips have led him to encounter snakes, bears, and treacherous terrain, his main focus is always the fish—how to find them, how to outsmart them, and how to hook them. In twenty-seven essays, Dungan takes us on a journey down bad roads and backcountry streams. Each tells a tale about fishing but also about hunting dogs, death, public-land policy, the trap of materialism, and accelerating environmental damage. This last becomes a new obsession. Fly-fishing in the arid Southwest has always been precarious, but how has fly-fishing changed, and what further impacts will climate change and resource extraction have? With his dog curled at his feet, Dungan attempts to unravel the tangled line of these hard questions.

In this entertaining, thought-provoking detective graphic novel set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a fictional Ilan Stavans seeks to solve a murder and locate a lost manuscript by a prominent 16th-century Crypto-Jew burned at the stake by the Spanish Inquisition. When young Rolando Perez falls to his death from a cliff outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, the mysteries immediately begin to accumulate. Was he pushed or did he jump? What might Rolando have been so desperate to protect that he would sacrifice himself? And what does a colorful concha pastry have to do with any of thi? n the midst of the investigation, Professor Ilan Stavans arrives in Santa Fe to give a lecture about the area’s long-buried Jewish history. He’s looking forward to relaxing afterward with an evening at the opera, but his presentation on “crypto-Jews” attracts unexpected attention, and soon Ilan is drawn into a desperate race to find the long-lost documents that might hold the key to Rolando’s death. His amateur sleuthing leads him to taco joints, desert ranches, soaring cathedrals, and, finally, deep into the region’s past, where he encounters Luis de Carvajal, also called “El Iluminado.” In a sixteenth-century tale of martyrdom that eerily echoes Rolando’s, Carvajal fled Spain for colonial Mexico at the height of the Spanish Inquisition, searching for his religious heritage—a hunt for which he, like Rolando, would pay the ultimate price. In El Iluminado, esteemed literary critic Ilan Stavans and author and illustrator Steve Sheinkin present a secret history of religion in the Americas, showing how thousands of European refugees have left a trail of ghostly footprints—and troves of mysteries—across the American Southwest. This paperback edition includes a new afterword recounting the amazing events that occurred after the original publication, including the real-life discovery of the long-lost memoir of Luis de Carvajal and its restoration to Mexico.

A lyric exploration of the complicated shared legacy of the atomic west through the lens of family history and the aftermath of the Manhattan Project. Ty Bannerman’s family came to Los Alamos in 1952 to build nuclear bombs. This fact has become their origin myth, threaded into the very DNA of Bannerman himself, his relatives, and his children. No one on this planet has been untouched by the nuclear industry, but the Bannermans—working-class contributors to the atomic industrial complex—are a unique embodiment of this reality. Nuclear Family is a lyrical memoir, a series of connected essays that use hard science, popular culture, and personal meditation to explore the role of nuclear weapons and the legacy of Los Alamos in the lives of one American family. Unsung heroes and victims, McCarthy-era interrogations, the Incredible Hulk, and corpses preserved for display are all linked, ultimately, to the bomb and the people who created it.

Two lovers go on one final road trip through the American desert, hoping that they can outrun life itself. Flash-fiction master Grant Faulkner and punk photographer Gail Butensky have partnered to create this unique narrative made up of stories alongside edge-of-the-world photography. The book tells of two lovers taking a reckless, searching road trip through the American West. Dawn is a photographer who captures desert landscapes. Jonny drives just to drive, running away from the end of time or running toward the end of time, looking for a home even as his restlessness overtakes him. By turns funny, poignant, and heartbreaking, something out there in the distance is big in emotions while brief in words. An extraordinary collaboration between word and image, Dawn and Jonny’s journey transports us to a place, achingly familiar, populated by love, loss, and wonder.