Hernan Diaz is the author of Borges, Between History and Eternity (Bloomsbury 2012), managing editor of RHM, and associate director of the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University. With the double intention of getting away from the trail and the cold, he had traveled south for days. But there were no such travelers-the moving shadows he saw almost every day in the distance were illusions. Had Håkan and his animals ever been spotted, the distant travelers would have taken the vanishing silhouettes for a mirage. The plot takes place in the American West in the 1850s during Manifest Destiny. In the Distance captures what Diaz describes as a triangle of absolute disorientation, foreignness and loneliness.

He did this each time he thought he spied someone on the circular horizon. He’s lived in New York for the last 20 years. Debut author Hernan Diaz depicts a bonafide Western character, an original born in the spirit of expansion and innovation and formed by the business of being that took up all his time. At first, it was a contest, but in time the beasts understood that, with an embrace and the slightest push, they had to lie down on their side and stay until Håkan got up.

Diaz defies the conventions of historical fiction and genre (travel narratives, the bildungsroman, nature writing, the Western), offering a probing look at the stereotypes that populate our past and a portrait of radical foreignness. Driven back over and over again on his journey through vast expanses, Håkan meets naturalists, criminals, religious fanatics, Indians, and lawmen, and his exploits turn him into a legend. He travels East in search of his brother, moving on foot against the great push to the West. 'A young Swedish boy finds himself in penniless and alone in California. Full of extraordinarily powerful images, we are plunged into a tumultuous history of the American west that is also a profound.

Diaz in the distance