I got carried away and spent 5 years writing a book about Oklahoma City, the most secretly interesting place in America. I am not from OKC and never expected to care about it, but the NYT Magazine sent me there to write about the city’s basketball team, the Thunder, and I got sucked in. What I found is that OKC is one of the great weirdo cities of the world — it holds, compressed, the entire history of our nation. I tried to cram it all in: outlaws, sit-ins, tornadoes, Durant & Westbrook, The Flaming Lips, city planners gone wild, a capitalism propaganda musuem, roadside trash, megachurches, grown men stoically weeping, etc etc. Boom Town was published in 2018. In 2019, it somehow became a Daily Double clue on Jeopardy. (Lindsey Shultz, pictured below, wagered $4000 and got it right.)

Buy it: indie | powells | amazon | audible (read by me)

Nice things people have said:

• "Regardless of how predisposed you are to take an interest, Boom Town will win you over every time. This is a dazzling work of nonfiction."

— Powells Books, Portland OR

• "Boom Town is the only good book!!"

— Community Bookstore, Brooklyn NY

• “I think it will go down in history as one of the great pieces of narrative nonfiction.”

  — Roman Mars, 99% Invisible

• "brilliant ... a riveting story ... Anderson writes beautifully about the human beings he encounters, both living and dead. A minute-by-minute account of the Oklahoma City bombing left me almost in tears. ... curious, hilarious, and wildly erudite"

— Brian Phillips, The New Yorker

• "fantastic ... enthralling, hilarious, and unexpectedly moving. ... a classic of its kind. Think City of Quartz if Mike Davis was a basketball junkie (City of Courts?) or if Jane Jacobs had co-written Blazing Saddles. Boom Town is an elaborate, elliptical fun house of narratives: a story about a basketball team that’s really a story about a city, or maybe it’s the other way around; a story about a city that seems utterly unique and inexplicable, until you keep reading and start wondering if you’re really just reading a story about America itself. ... an embarrassment of riches"

  — Slate

• "nuanced, immersive ... an unlikely triumph … Anderson takes a city almost universally overlooked and turns it into a metaphor for, well, everything."

— Washington Post

• "[Anderson] has discovered a subject that energizes him the way a birch-bark canoe roused John McPhee, the way a French meal stoked M.F.K. Fisher and the way the burning Bronx fired up Jonathan Mahler. ... sly, entertaining ...  genuinely American phantasmagoria ... brilliantly rendered ... wild and gusty."

— New York Times Book Review

• "brimming with character ... I haven’t read a nonfiction book that has made me yearn so strongly to visit an American city since John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil."

  — The Atlantic Monthly