Lynzsea Sky

Book excerpt: "Rozek's [work] is antimedia media, almost disorienting in its simplicity."—Wired magazine Lynzsea Sky, a twenty-something college student, tells the author her heartbreaking, disturbing, and culture-challenging life story. She speaks at first hesitantly, then with increasing clarity about sex, drugs, family life, education, tattoos, homelessness, her dreams of becoming a filmmaker, her brother's time in prison, and her mother's struggle with mental illness. The book is just the conversation; the absence of anything else makes this a groundbreaking new form of nonfiction. The lean prose is void of stylistic hijinks, drawing the reader in without drawing attention to the writer. The author's first book is part of a planned series called American True Stories, all of which will be similarly dialogue based. Michael Rozek's work illuminates real American lives and gives a voice to people who often are overlooked by the mainstream media. Michael Rozek has written more than two thousand articles for various national magazines including Rolling Stone, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, and The Village Voice in a career spanning nearly forty years. He walked away from a lucrative free-lance career to publish the popular Rozek's Newsletter in the 1990s in response to the "fast food" journalism he saw increasingly creeping into American magazines. For more than a decade, Rozek and his wife Charlotte have struggled with homelessness and poverty, yet Rozek continues to talk to and write about everyday Americans with empathy and insight. This is his first book.