The Sixth Desert

The Sixth Desert is a bold, propulsive literary epic—part family saga, part Hollywood tragedy, part American reckoning—unfolding in six self-contained but interconnected acts. Spanning Alta and Baja California, it moves backward in time from our fractured present to the antebellum South, excavating the myths, failures, and dark obsessions that have shaped America.

At its heart is Maximilian von Maar, a Hollywood scion who dreamed of making a masterpiece but instead became the most celebrated porn director of his time. Fallen from grace, he is only capable of leaving wreckage in his wake. This first volume, "The Director," follows the stranded souls still waiting for him in the desert, twenty years after production was supposed to begin.

A novel of great expectations and even greater failures, of broken marriages and lost children, of spectacle and collapse, The Sixth Desert is a panoramic vision of California as both paradise and illusion—the last edge of our familiar world, where image devours reality. Yet at the heart of this intricate machinery lies something startlingly simple: a love story, adorned, like a timepiece, with beautiful complications. Volume I collects parts 1-3 of the sextet.