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With its blend of fool's wisdom and deeply felt humanity, Panorama City is heir to Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and Steve Martin's The Jerk. From his deathbed*, twenty-eight-year-old Oppen Porter-an openhearted, bicycle-riding, binocular-toting, self-described slow absorber-unspools into a cassette recorder his tale of self-determination, from village idiot to man of the world, for the benefit of his unborn son. Told in an astonishingly charming and wise voice, Oppen's account traces forty days and nights navigating the fast-food joints, storefront churches, and home-office psychologists of the San Fernando Valley. Ping-ponging between his watchful, sharp-tongued aunt and an outlaw philosopher with the face of a newly hatched crocodile, Oppen finds himself constantly in the sights of people who believe that their way is the only way for him. Oppen Porter is an American original (Stewart O'Nan) for whom finding one's own way is both a delightful art and a painstaking science. Disarmingly funny and surreptitiously moving, Panorama City makes us see the world, and our place in it, with new eyes. *Not really

Paul Michael Garcia, an AudioFile Earphones Award winner and former company member of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, received his classical training in theater from Southern Oregon University, where he worked as an actor, director, and designer.

Antoine Wilson is the author of the novel The Interloper and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is a contributing editor of A Public Space and lives and surfs in Los Angeles.