Flights

“An absolutely overwhelming, magisterial tour-de-force.”—Junot Diaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Mind-bending … so profound and original it defies a brief endorsement.”—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous People’s History of the United States

“Marvelous vignettes [that] shed new light on intriguing lives.”—Gerald Horne, author of The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance & the Origins of the USA

“Fine-grained and deeply engaging.” —Astra Taylor, author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone

“Necessary, compelling and often shocking.”—Francine Prose, author of The Vixen

”[Flights] is a wonderfully written text about a truly remarkable if also painfully elusive subject: artists and others on the run from Cold War capitalism.”—CounterPunch

“Whitney has provided an important insight into the way in which the US state has sought to influence the cultural agenda, shape the political landscape and sanitise the way in which the world views the United States.”—Liberation

Joel Whitney is the author of Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers, which The New Republic called a ‘powerful warning’. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The Baffler, The Wall Street Journal, Boston Review, New York Magazine, and elsewhere. He is a former features editor at Al Jazeera America and a founder and former editor-in-chief of Guernica, for which he was awarded the 2017 PEN/Nora Magid Award for Excellence in Editing. His essays in The Baffler, Dissent and Salon were Notables in Best American Essays 2017, 2015 and 2013.