Hella Nation

Charts the author's personal journey, from his stark but sympathetic portrayals of sex workers in Porn Valley to his raw portrait of a Hollywood uber-agent turned war documentarian and hero of America's far right. This book presents an observed tour of the jagged edges of all those other Americas hiding in plain sight.

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Evan Wright has always had an affinity for outsiders - the people he calls 'the lost tribes of America'. Over the course of his career as an award-winning journalist, he has written about men and women with completely opposing attitudes towards today's dominant culture. But they all agree on one thing: they don't fit in. "Hella Nation" charts Wright's deeply personal journey, from his stark but sympathetic portrayals of sex workers in Porn Valley to his raw portrait of a Hollywood uber-agent turned war documentarian and hero of America's far right. Along the way he meets runaway teens in Hollywood earning corporate dollars as skateboard pitchmen, radical anarchists plotting the overthrow of capitalism from tree-sits in the Oregon rain forest and young American troops on the hunt for terrorists in the combat zones of the Middle East. His subjects are people for whom The American Dream is either just out of grasp, or something they have chosen to reject altogether. Sometimes frightening, usually profane, and often darkly comic, "Hella Nation" is Wright's meticulously observed tour of the jagged edges of all those other Americas hiding in plain sight.