Panorama

By: Steve Kistulentz

Narrated by: Kiff VandenHeuvel

Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins

Publisher's summary

A Chicago Review of Books Most Anticipated Fiction Book of 2018

"Fast-paced, energetic, searing. There are moments in Steve Kistulentz's Panorama that will take your breath away." - Daniel Alarcón, author of Lost City Radio

Richard MacMurray, a cable news talking head, is paid handsomely to pontificate on the issues of the moment. On New Year's Day he is scheduled to be a guest on a prominent morning talk show. As he awaits the broadcast, the network interrupts with news that a jet airliner has crashed in Dallas and that everyone aboard has perished.

Within an hour, amateur videotape surfaces of the plane's last moments, transforming the crash into a living image: familiar, constant, and horrifying. Richard learns that his sister, Mary Beth, was aboard the doomed flight, leaving behind her six-year-old son, Gabriel. Richard is the boy's only living relative. When he is given an opportunity to bring Gabriel home, it may be that the loss of his sister will provide him with the second chapter he never knew he wanted.

In this powerful debut, Steve Kistulentz captures the sprawl of contemporary America - its culture, its values, the workaday existence of its people - with kaleidoscopic sweep and controlled intensity. Yet within the expansive scope of Panorama lies an intimate portrait of human loss rendered with precision, humanity, and humor.

©2018 Steve Kistulentz (P)2018 Hachette Audio

Critic reviews

"A heartbreaking but ultimately heartfilling day in the life of a country in existential crisis, a panorama of points of view, and a novel about the ways we lose and find one another. Just read it."— Tom Franklin, New York Times bestselling author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

"Kistulentz confidently sets up and populates the panorama of the book's title...This book has the architecture of a great novel...A writer worth watching."— Kirkus Reviews

"PANORAMA is a remarkable literary work, rare in its ability to be both thematically complex and a compelling read. Steve Kistulentz remarkably transforms our TV culture's participatory tragedy into a deep meditation on human connectedness. This is a stunning debut by an important new writer."— Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

"It has been said that a good novelist is also by default a first-rate sociologist and psychologist, too -- along with being a magician. Panorama perfectly exemplifies this truth. In sharp, smart prose, Steve Kistulentz portrays the terrible strands of tragedy. The result is an engrossing, powerful, capacious novel, and a very impressive debut."— Richard Bausch, PEN/Malamud Award-winning author of Peace

" Panorama lives up to its title. This is a novel aswim in language, in drama, in character -- it has the kind of bigness we too rarely see in fiction anymore. Steve Kistulentz is a hell of a writer, and this is a hell of a hard book to put down."— Darin Strauss, National Book Critics Circle Award winner for Half a Life

"Fast-paced, energetic, searing. There are moments in Steve Kistulentz's Panorama that will take your breath away."— Daniel Alarcón, author of Lost City Radio

"Written with an intimate precision, Panorama brings tremendous compassion to people we take for granted ...This book, with its enormous ambition, serves to remind us that it's necessary and human to feel."— Chris Offutt, author of Kentucky Straight