The Writing of Max Vande Vaarst

Blind Lucia, Her Eyes in an Icetray

Lucia comes from a family of ascetics, devoted to the veneration of Christ through the mortification of the body. But in the year following the death of her mother, she has become tired of her sequestered life, and of the unending line of pilgrims who pass through the doors of their Hollywood monastery, desperate to be healed.

Into Blossom

A boy and a stray cat drive through Nebraska at night, a bad experience behind them, the cities of the east still many miles ahead. They stop to rest in a cornfield and the boy wonders why it is that cats purr.

Hard Travelin’

The 1961 meeting between Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie. It’s a moment in folk music history that has become a celebrated piece of folklore itself. But nevermind how it actually unfolded – the truth is, as always, in the legend.

Rags and Bones

Beulah Rafferty’s grandad loves garbage. He buys it, he sells it, he loads up his truck with it, and there isn’t a home left in the Louisiana bayou in which he hasn’t scoured for more of it. Except for that old plantation house deep in the woods…

A State Without a Center

To those fortunate enough to call it home, New Jersey has always been a strange and wonderful state, brimming with its own eccentricities and all the variety of American life. Yet to the outside world, it has long been the butt of cruel humor, the place where culture goes to choke to death on Turnpike exhaust fumes while mobsters pick politicians’ wallets in the shadows of shopping malls. Why?

A People’s History of Max