French Paperback
Extent: 204 pages
ISBN: 9781967751082
Price: $24

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Nabokov never died; he just moved to Greece and changed his name to Panagiotis Kehagias.

—Joshua Cohen

Springing from a seafoam matrix of submerged emotion and memory, Panagiotis Kehagias’s prose marvels liquify and anneal into tomorrow’s myths. The Sixth Desert gives us California as we have never seen it, stripped by an exacting radiography of language to reveal the bone and tissue—the madness, spectacle, and fantasy—six feet under the wasted dust of its parched skin.

—Greg Jackson

Exquisitely wrought, Panagiotis Kehagias’s prose thrives on insight while leaning toward wonder. Vivid, precise, and disorienting, The Sixth Desert altered my literary DNA.

—Vanessa Veselka

A startling and original debut, The Sixth Desert possesses a linguistic dexterity that recalls Melville and Nabokov at their finest, letting you dream of what the novel can still accomplish.

—Ranbir Sidhu

After translating many American masters into Greek, it’s Panagiotis Kehagias’s turn to give the English language his own mastery; the quality of the writing in The Sixth Desert—thoroughly crafted, attentive all the time to rhythms and sonorities—matches its boundless ambitions.

—Felipe Franco Munhoz

In brilliant, uncompromising prose, Kehagias’s stories reveal the world beneath our world, one we always feared was there. An unforgettable new voice in fiction.

—Maxim Loskutoff

Novels like this are few and far between. A sprawling, pitch-dark epic on the vicissitudes of love and sex, power and history, Kehagias has created a world unto himself. Don’t let the name fool you: The Sixth Desert is first rate.

—Dominic Amerena

The Sixth Desert is a bold, propulsive literary epic—part family saga, part Hollywood tragedy, part American reckoning—unfolding in six self-contained but interconnected acts. Spanning Alta and Baja California, it moves backward in time from our fractured present to the antebellum South, excavating the myths, failures, and dark obsessions that have shaped America.

At its heart is Maximilian von Maar, a Hollywood scion who dreamed of making a masterpiece but instead became the most celebrated porn director of his time—fallen from grace, he is only capable of leaving wreckage in his wake. This first volume, The Director, follows the stranded souls still waiting for him in the desert, twenty years after production was supposed to begin.

A novel of great expectations and even ­greater failures, of broken marriages and lost children, of spectacle and collapse, The Sixth Desert is a panoramic vision of California as both paradise and illusion—the last edge of our familiar world, where image devours reality. Yet at the heart of this intricate machinery lies something startlingly simple: a love story, adorned, like a timepiece, with beautiful complications. Volume I collects parts 1–3 of the sextet.