Colin Winnette

A minute-by-minute analysis of Richard Linklater’s 1993 film, Dazed and Confused. Blending film criticism with creative nonfiction, each book in the Timecodes series focuses on one film, exploring it minute by minute beginning with minute one, and ending with the final minute before the closing credits. This book uses a close study of Dazed and Confused to tell three interrelated stories of adolescent development: the filmmaker’s, the film’s characters, and the author’s own. The film’s unconventional approach to character and plot mirrors the author’s own structureless and energetic childhood, while also having a profound impact on his artistic development, as the film revealed that bending traditional narrative rules could make a story feel more honest and precise. The film also marked a kind of artistic coming-of-age for Linklater himself, as he transitioned from his self-financed indie infancy into his first studio film. The structure of Dazed and Confused mirrors the roving momentum of a youthful night, moving fluidly between characters, incidents, conversations, and what can only loosely be called “set pieces”, while never feeling aimless. Each moment moves the night forward, revealing more of our characters as we slowly form a sense of what the rest of their summer might look like, and how the rest of their lives might go (though we’re also reminded there’ll be surprises along the way). As these moments accumulate, viewers are invited to reflect on their own lives, their own friends, their own easy nights of highs and lows, boredom and elation, danger and congress. Adopting the formal conceit of the Timecodes’ series, this book accepts the film’s invitation to live moment by moment, taking each discrete minute as an opportunity to reorient and explore new vantages on both the movie and the author’s own life.

A minute-by-minute analysis of Richard Linklater’s 1993 film, Dazed and Confused. Blending film criticism with creative nonfiction, each book in the Timecodes series focuses on one film, exploring it minute by minute beginning with minute one, and ending with the final minute before the closing credits. This book uses a close study of Dazed and Confused to tell three interrelated stories of adolescent development: the filmmaker’s, the film’s characters, and the author’s own. The film’s unconventional approach to character and plot mirrors the author’s own structureless and energetic childhood, while also having a profound impact on his artistic development, as the film revealed that bending traditional narrative rules could make a story feel more honest and precise. The film also marked a kind of artistic coming-of-age for Linklater himself, as he transitioned from his self-financed indie infancy into his first studio film. The structure of Dazed and Confused mirrors the roving momentum of a youthful night, moving fluidly between characters, incidents, conversations, and what can only loosely be called “set pieces”, while never feeling aimless. Each moment moves the night forward, revealing more of our characters as we slowly form a sense of what the rest of their summer might look like, and how the rest of their lives might go (though we’re also reminded there’ll be surprises along the way). As these moments accumulate, viewers are invited to reflect on their own lives, their own friends, their own easy nights of highs and lows, boredom and elation, danger and congress. Adopting the formal conceit of the Timecodes’ series, this book accepts the film’s invitation to live moment by moment, taking each discrete minute as an opportunity to reorient and explore new vantages on both the movie and the author’s own life.

Written in a seamless, entrancing style, Gainesville follows the twisted branches of a restless family tree in a small Texas town. Originally published in the novella collection, Fondly, this new edition features a foreword by Brian Evenson."This is a book I first read at a formidable time, in a driftless, listless post-college haze. I've since thought about these characters, this family, consistently in the last ten plus years, recommending Gainesville to anyone I knew who needed a little commiseration. I'm thrilled to bring Gainesville back into print so this family's hapless lineage can live on." - Joshua Bohnsack, publisher

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Marrying the philosophical absurdities of life, technology, start-up culture, and family, Users is for readers of Ling Ma, Dave Eggers's The Circle, and viewers of the hit Apple TV+ original series Severance Miles, a lead creative at a midsize virtual reality company known for its "original experiences," has engineered a new product called The Ghost Lover. Wildly popular from the outset, the "game" is simple: a user's simulated life is almost identical to their reality, except they're haunted by the ghost of an ex-lover. However, when a shift in the company's strategic vision puts The Ghost Lover at the center of a platform-wide controversy, Miles becomes the target of user outrage, and starts receiving a series of anonymous death threats. Typed notes sealed in envelopes with no postage or return address, these persistent threats push Miles into a paranoid panic, blurring his own sense of reality, catalyzing the collapse of his career, his marriage, and his relationship with his children. The once-promising road to success becomes a narrow set of choices for Miles, who, in a last ditch effort to save his job, pitches his masterpiece, a revolutionary device code-named the Egg, which will transform the company. The consequences for Miles seal him inside the walls of his life as what was once anxiety explodes into devastating absoluteness. In a world rife with the unchecked power and ambition of tech, Users investigates--with both humor and creeping dread--how interpersonal experiences and private decisions influence the hasty developments that have the power to permanently alter the landscape of human experience.

Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for FictionA New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Marrying the philosophical absurdities of life, technology, start-up culture, and family, Users is for readers of Ling Ma, Dave Eggers's The Circle, and viewers of the hit Apple TV+ original series Severance Miles, a lead creative at a midsize virtual reality company known for its "original experiences," has engineered a new product called The Ghost Lover. Wildly popular from the outset, the "game" is simple: a user's simulated life is almost identical to their reality, except they're haunted by the ghost of an ex-lover. However, when a shift in the company's strategic vision puts The Ghost Lover at the center of a platform-wide controversy, Miles becomes the target of user outrage, and starts receiving a series of anonymous death threats. Typed notes sealed in envelopes with no postage or return address, these persistent threats push Miles into a paranoid panic, blurring his own sense of reality, catalyzing the collapse of his career, his marriage, and his relationship with his children. The once-promising road to success becomes a narrow set of choices for Miles, who, in a last ditch effort to save his job, pitches his masterpiece, a revolutionary device code-named the Egg, which will transform the company. The consequences for Miles seal him inside the walls of his life as what was once anxiety explodes into devastating absoluteness. In a world rife with the unchecked power and ambition of tech, Users investigates--with both humor and creeping dread--how interpersonal experiences and private decisions influence the hasty developments that have the power to permanently alter the landscape of human experience.

A daughter disappears in the middle of the night. What happens in the aftermath of this tragedy-after the search is abandoned, after the TV crews move on to cover the latest horrific incident-is the story of Coyote. There is a marriage and a detective. There is a storm, a talk show host, and a roasted boar. People are murdered...

Brooke and Sugar are contract killers without a contract. Bird is the boy who mysteriously woke beside them while between towns. For miles, there is only desert and wilderness, and along the fringes, people.The story follows Bird, and the middling bountyhunters after they've been chased from town, each in pursuit of their own sense of...