Reckon
Logan Phillips
“Reckon illuminates all that tries to hide.” — JAVIER ZAMORA, author of Solito: A Memoir
“Logan Phillips’s Reckon is a hell of a book... Arizona needs this book. America needs this book. You do too.” — ANDER MONSON, author of Predator: A Movie, a Memoir, an Obsession
In Reckon, artist Logan Phillips returns to the fabled town of Tombstone to face the history he was raised on as a boy—gunfights, outlaws, and Hollywood cowboys—for a new, personal confrontation with the West’s foundational mythology. This hybrid memoir also explores sexuality, whiteness, masculinity, parenting, and what it means to love a land rife with contradiction and “slathered in murder.”
As innovative as it is moving, this memoir is constructed of essays, photography, poetry, newspaper clippings from the Tombstone Epitaph Local Edition, and of course, movie screenplays. As he writes the characters of his past––including Youngfather and Teenme––Phillips finds the real history to be much more complex than the stories he was told. This is Tombstone in the 1980s and 90s, a century after the West’s most famous gunfight––a fifteen-second event still performed every day in historical reenactments––where Phillips’s father works as a historical exhibit designer at the Courthouse Museum and his uncle as a stuntman at Old Tucson Studios.
With an original, searing voice, Reckon is an essential answer to the tough questions of past and future, inheritance and reinvention, all from the perspective of a boy stuck in the middle.
NARRATED BY THE AUTHOR. Cover: art by Logan Phillips, design by Leigh McDonald.
“A full-throated consideration of the antecedent of sultry desert queerness—the cowboy.” — RAQUEL GUTIÉRREZ, author of Brown Neon
“Reckon implodes the braggadocio and myth of the gunslinging West.” — ANTHONY CODY, Whiting Award winner
“Flying through masculine silence, Reckon is the owl.” — SESSHU FOSTER, author of City of the Future
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