This image is the cover for the book Impossible Owls

Impossible Owls

The acclaimed journalist’s New York Times–bestselling essay collection: “hilarious, nimble, and thoroughly illuminating” (Colson Whitehead, author of The Underground Railroad).

In this highly anticipated debut collection, Brian Phillips demonstrates why he’s one of the most iconoclastic journalists of the digital age, beloved for his ambitious, off-kilter, meticulously reported essays that read like novels.

The eight essays assembled here—five from Phillips’s Grantland and MTV days, and three new pieces—go beyond simply chronicling some of the modern world’s most uncanny, unbelievable, and spectacular oddities. They explore the interconnectedness of the globalized world, the consequences of history, the power of myth, and the ways people attempt to find meaning.

Phillips searches for tigers in India, and uncovers a multigenerational mystery involving an oil tycoon and his niece turned stepdaughter turned wife in the Oklahoma town where he grew up. Dogged and self-aware, Phillips is an exhilarating guide to the confusion and wonder of the world today. If John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead was the last great collection of New Journalism from the print era, Impossible Owls is the first of the digital age.

Brian Phillips

Brian Phillips is a former staff writer for Grantland and a former senior writer for MTV News. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and Slate, among other publications, and his work has appeared in Best American Sports Writing and Best American Magazine Writing. He lives in central Pennsylvania. Impossible Owls is his first book.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux