“These essays travel the roads of memory and imagination in sentences as sharp as their setting’s horizon, poignantly navigating the distance between what we once knew and who we’ve become. Joan Didion wrote, ‘A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest.’ West Texas belongs to Cade Mason.” —Jill Talbot, author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir
“One of the most potent incantations of a particular time and place I can remember reading in a long time. Mason conjures his landscape and family with intense clarity, generosity of spirit, humility, and affection. A beautiful book.” —Ryan Van Meter, author of If You Knew Then What I Know Now
“Mason never fails to evoke the infinitude of West Texas's landscape, a place where beauty hovers on the horizon like a storm. In Engine Running, he pulls off the impossible: profiling his escape while honoring his longing for this windswept, cloud-haloed home.” —Clinton Crockett Peters, author of Mountain Madness: Found and Lost in the Peaks of America and Japan