Shakespeare & Co. is delighted to host a reading and discussion with the celebrated founders of County Highway: America’s Only Newspaper on Saturday, August 9th at 7:00 pm. Walter Kirn, Editor-at-Large, and Amanda Fortini, natural remedies columnist, will give readings and discuss the founding and future of the newspaper. This event is free and open to the public.
About County Highway:
County Highway is a magazine about America in the form of a 19th-century newspaper, started on a shoestring by three friends (David Samuels, Walter Kirn, and Ryan Baesemann) in the wake of the pandemic. We’ve since become the fastest growing print periodical in the country — earning an annual circulation of 150,000 copies barely one year after releasing our debut issue.
The name County Highway is inspired by what we believe is the perfect-sized place for the enhancement of life and art. A county is a chunk of earth big enough to allow for a variety of human types, but small enough to get to know a decent number of your neighbors, where they come from, what they’re proud of, what they fear, what they smoke, what they drink, and what they love. The county where our newspaper is located is somewhere between all those places, real and imaginary. It’s the scale of the place that’s important to us, and also the idea of traveling from one to another with an eye towards finding new answers to the founding American questions of who we are, and why we are here.
Dubbed “America’s Only Newspaper,” we feature hairy off-road adventures by some of America's best and strangest writers; reports on the myriad of political and spiritual crises that are gripping our country and their deeper cultural and historical sources; regular columns about agriculture, civil liberties, animals, herbal medicine, and living off the grid, both mentally and physically; essays about literature and art; and an entire section devoted to music. Offering a road-side banquet of American humor, common-speech, and social and political insights in every issue, we print six times each year for our readers across all fifty states and Canada. Our pages have proven that wherever there’s a stop sign, there’s a story.
Author Biographies:
Walter Kirn is a fiction writer, essayist, critic, and editor-at-large of County Highway. His novels include Up in the Air and Thumbsucker, both of which were made into major feature films. His essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper's, and countless other publications. His latest book is Blood Will Out, a memoir.
Amanda Fortini is a natural remedies columnist for County Highway. She divides her time between Livingston, Montana, and Las Vegas, Nevada, about which she is currently writing a book of essays, Flamingo Road. From 2021 to 2022, she did a nine-month flower essence apprenticeship and got certified as a practitioner.
