While working on his debut Arkansas John Brandon kept up a tight schedule of moving from state to state. The reason for his story to be eventually situated in Arkansas is that there is something in the Arkansan air that's difficult to define. It's as if something could happen at any given time. And indeed: the days of misfits Kyle and Swin are languid and their nights are filled with routine drug deliveries. But then a shot is fired and when morning comes people have been killed and both gents have no more time for slow learning, bad judgment, or foul luck. No reading material for sensitive souls!

• At this year's Crossing Border magazines McSweeney's, The Believer and Wholphin present John Brandon as one of America's most interesting new authors

• 'Arkansas rants against the Machine, in a voice combining Raymond Chandler's side-of-the-mouth noir with Quentin Tarantino's gleeful-psychopath wit and Mark Twain's episodic romance of the journey. Better add Holden Caulfield, too.' - San Francisco Chronicle
• ‘I like to write about places I've been to only briefly. If I know a place too well, and there's no mystery, I lose interest. If the place is too set in my mind, if I know every 7-Eleven and car wash and know the people who work there, it's harder for me to mold that place into what I need it to be. Arkansas is a hard place to pin down, so anything seems possible. It's Southern, to be sure, but much of its history is Western. Oklahoma is right there, and that's prairie country. If you go north, into Missouri, you're in the Midwest. Most states, you know what you're getting into about five minutes after you arrive. To me, Arkansas isn't that way.' - John Brandon