What do you think?
Rate this book
Farewell Transmission: Notes from Hidden Spaces
In Farewell Transmission, Will McGrath guides us on a rambling quest into the enlightenment of other lives. Funny and heartbreaking, intimate and galvanizing, these essays venture from Yemen to Lesotho to the Bronx and beyond. We find Caravaggio at an Arizona homeless shelter and meet Elvis in rural Canada. We encounter diamond miners and professional wrestlers, night watchmen and righteous ex-cons—those wilderness prophets too frequently cropped from the picture.
This is a book of hiddenness: of secret lives and ghost stories and obscure passions. Whether he’s unraveling the fraught history of a noose in Namibia or wandering the Driftless Area with a modern-day goatherd, McGrath is on an excavation into landscapes rarely seen. Like Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams and John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead, these essays pulse with electric prose and vivid characters, seeking out the invisible forces that bind us across our wondrous and troubling planet.
Farewell Transmission is a book about paying attention: to the concealed lives we encounter every day, and to the hidden worlds that exist within our own.
This is a book of hiddenness: of secret lives and ghost stories and obscure passions. Whether he’s unraveling the fraught history of a noose in Namibia or wandering the Driftless Area with a modern-day goatherd, McGrath is on an excavation into landscapes rarely seen. Like Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams and John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead, these essays pulse with electric prose and vivid characters, seeking out the invisible forces that bind us across our wondrous and troubling planet.
Farewell Transmission is a book about paying attention: to the concealed lives we encounter every day, and to the hidden worlds that exist within our own.
216 pages, Paperback
Published August 2, 2022
5 people are currently reading
237 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
November 14, 2023
"The cumulative effect is that of blurred borders."
Absolutely essential in every way.
Farewell Transmission is like a collection of polaroid snapshots that capture the beauty and significance of the rough edges of the world, of people and spaces that are overlooked, unexamined. Simultaneously confronting and inviting, these essays compel the reader to reorder their perceptions of the world and their place in it. Will McGrath mixes together the foreign and the universal into a cohesive custard and offers it to the reader, saying: this is humanity; this is who we are.
Memorable Moments:
“After all, constellations are just stories we tell ourselves, attempts to impose order onto something beyond order. And ghost stories are the same, a rickety narrative framework we build around the ultimate lacuna, shaky wooden handrails beside the abyss. And the stars themselves are a kind of ghost story. Those points of light are vast thermonuclear explosions that happened long ago—blooms of cosmic violence in the wake of things that no longer exist.”
“This reverie filled me with such electric joy that I had the momentary urge to grab my daughter and squeeze until she became a fine paste. The circuits in my brain had flooded: the lines for love and violence run parallel, and the surge of emotion had crossed the two in uncanny fashion.”
“we chatted with the awkward jauntiness of two people who had recently been forced to consider the termination of the self.”
“Small white clouds of smoke tufted from his window, and unperturbed on the man’s lap perched a white poodle, head regal and alert, fur ruffled in the wind, that poodle gazing out across the lone and level tundra, master of all he surveyed.”
“Then the bell rang and some long-dormant instinct asserted dominion over my body. I blacked out briefly and came to screaming 'Do your job, ref!' through mouthfuls of commissary hotdog. Ancient muscle memory had emerged violently intact.”
“We send our strange tendrils into the world, those curious passions and inexplicable pursuits to which we devote hours and years and decades. We let our unbeautiful fungal filaments creep through the damp and dark, and mostly we find nothing, and sometimes we find something—a tiny node of commonality, then another node, and eventually maybe a network. And one day someone gives us a ride to the show, and the world becomes a few degrees less lonely, a few degrees more legible.”
“Our most intimate bonds (of family, of relatedness, of romantic love) operate on strange hidden frequencies. They defy easy categorization and pat analysis. We tell ourselves the rules of this domain are natural and immemorial—but they are always constructed and often very recent. We build temples to enshrine these rules, and sometimes their structures are sound and sometimes their gilt façades mask places where the beams of logic have long rotted away. Perhaps all I’m saying is this: each of us must examine the narratives that have been presented, knock their walls for soundness, and choose whether to accept or reject.”
December 7, 2022
I picked this up as a blind buy, it was prominently displayed at the front of the bookstore. A book of travel essays seemed appealing at the time and a mention on the back of meeting Elvis in rural Canada sold me. Usually every book of essays or short stories has a few that are simply dull or seem shoehorned in as page filler, but not in Farewell Transmission. Will McGrath is able to capture the humanity of the subjects he writes about, and is assertive with his opinions without being preachy. There is humor and sadness throughout the book and often within the same story. If I had one minor complaint, it is classified as a book of travel essays but the majority take place in the Twin Cities or Lesotho. I don't blame Will McGrath for this, it's the fault of every print media publisher who isn't paying him to travel and tell the stories of Earth's real characters. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to buy some wrestling tickets and book a trip to Simcoe County, Ontario.
September 15, 2022
McGrath is a remarkable writer. Each essay a gem.
August 11, 2022
My review in the Star Tribune: https://www.startribune.com/review-fa...
Why do those of us who love to travel love to travel? DePaul University professor of environmental science Liam Heneghan says it's partly because being somewhere new causes us to "pay rapt attention to the little things." Because this "heightened and delighted attention to the ordinary, which manifests in someone new to a place" didn't yet have a name, Heneghan gave it one in an essay for Aeon magazine: allokataplixis — from the Greek allo, meaning "other," and katapliktiko, meaning "wonder."
Those of us who read travel writing do so, I'd argue, for a similar reason: to experience that sense of other-wonder without leaving home. In "Farewell Transmission: Notes From Hidden Spaces," Minneapolis writer Will McGrath delivers on the amazement and fascination to be found in the details of unfamiliar places, especially when those details are observed through the eyes of a viewer who is as capable of feeling astonishment at the most mundane people and occurrences as he is at the momentous ones.
Divided into four sections — "Overture," "Invisibilities," "Excavations" and "Coda" — this collection of 16 peripatetic essays comes alive with curiosity and compassion as its author rambles from Canada to Spain, Michigan to Namibia, Yemen to the Bronx and more, examining everything from active-shooter drills, to racially charged monuments, to stolen iPhones that mysteriously resurface halfway around the globe.
One of the early pieces, "The Kings of Simcoe County," finds McGrath traversing Ontario in search of Elvis — or rather, in search of those who pretend to be him at "the world's largest Elvis fest, a multiday celebration involving parades of classic cars, carnival rides, Elvis flicks under the stars, hundreds of live performances, and a battle royal to determine the greatest Elvis impersonator on the planet."
By the end, McGrath has revealed as much about the members of the crowd — "middle school teachers and salesmen, grandmothers and lawyers, music junkies and bro-bonding divorcées" — as he has about the King himself.
McGrath's debut book about Lesotho, the small landlocked kingdom surrounded by South Africa, "Everything Lost Is Found Again," won the Society of Midland Authors Award for Biography and Memoir, and his talents for examining the minutiae of nonhabitual environments and the effect they can have on the people who visit them are on display once again in this latest offering.
In "Hallucination (Donut Shop)," set in Maine, he becomes dazed with admiration for the cashier's coiffure, writing, "Her hair! — this beyond all else I need to convey: bangs piled into clouds, her hair was a buoyant holdover from the early nineties, hair that predated the tech bubble, hair that preceded Enron, hair that had never looted anyone's pension."
And in "Ballad of the Curtain Jerker," he goes on his own Clifford Geertz-ian "ethnographic journey, probing into what professional wrestling is and what it means, attempting to decipher the story it tells us about ourselves."
By the end of the book, McGrath has shown that, as his epigraph by Paul Éluard says, "There is another world, but it is in this one."
Why do those of us who love to travel love to travel? DePaul University professor of environmental science Liam Heneghan says it's partly because being somewhere new causes us to "pay rapt attention to the little things." Because this "heightened and delighted attention to the ordinary, which manifests in someone new to a place" didn't yet have a name, Heneghan gave it one in an essay for Aeon magazine: allokataplixis — from the Greek allo, meaning "other," and katapliktiko, meaning "wonder."
Those of us who read travel writing do so, I'd argue, for a similar reason: to experience that sense of other-wonder without leaving home. In "Farewell Transmission: Notes From Hidden Spaces," Minneapolis writer Will McGrath delivers on the amazement and fascination to be found in the details of unfamiliar places, especially when those details are observed through the eyes of a viewer who is as capable of feeling astonishment at the most mundane people and occurrences as he is at the momentous ones.
Divided into four sections — "Overture," "Invisibilities," "Excavations" and "Coda" — this collection of 16 peripatetic essays comes alive with curiosity and compassion as its author rambles from Canada to Spain, Michigan to Namibia, Yemen to the Bronx and more, examining everything from active-shooter drills, to racially charged monuments, to stolen iPhones that mysteriously resurface halfway around the globe.
One of the early pieces, "The Kings of Simcoe County," finds McGrath traversing Ontario in search of Elvis — or rather, in search of those who pretend to be him at "the world's largest Elvis fest, a multiday celebration involving parades of classic cars, carnival rides, Elvis flicks under the stars, hundreds of live performances, and a battle royal to determine the greatest Elvis impersonator on the planet."
By the end, McGrath has revealed as much about the members of the crowd — "middle school teachers and salesmen, grandmothers and lawyers, music junkies and bro-bonding divorcées" — as he has about the King himself.
McGrath's debut book about Lesotho, the small landlocked kingdom surrounded by South Africa, "Everything Lost Is Found Again," won the Society of Midland Authors Award for Biography and Memoir, and his talents for examining the minutiae of nonhabitual environments and the effect they can have on the people who visit them are on display once again in this latest offering.
In "Hallucination (Donut Shop)," set in Maine, he becomes dazed with admiration for the cashier's coiffure, writing, "Her hair! — this beyond all else I need to convey: bangs piled into clouds, her hair was a buoyant holdover from the early nineties, hair that predated the tech bubble, hair that preceded Enron, hair that had never looted anyone's pension."
And in "Ballad of the Curtain Jerker," he goes on his own Clifford Geertz-ian "ethnographic journey, probing into what professional wrestling is and what it means, attempting to decipher the story it tells us about ourselves."
By the end of the book, McGrath has shown that, as his epigraph by Paul Éluard says, "There is another world, but it is in this one."
January 2, 2025
I read this in April, fairly early in the year, and when I set it down I thought to myself, “this may be the best book I read this year.” And it was. This book is phenomenal. I can’t wait to read it again.
August 18, 2025
A collection of interesting vignettes from fringe characters that exist on the periphery of “normal” human experience. Whether it’s turning a lens of compassion on a homeless youth who harbors a justified burning anger towards the whole world or examining the wild passions of Elvis impersonators out looking for a good time, Will manages to find a connection point that grabs the reader and says to them, “there’s more here, isn’t there? There’s more here worth understanding.”
The author tells these stories with an intoxicating blend of fine-tuned prose, poetic imagery and genuine down-to-earth frankness, and the novel succeeds by dialing in that balance. Will walks a rather thin line, craftily navigating threads of despair, hope, and absurdity, and shows the reader that there can exist an important intersection where those deep, conflicting feelings can shine all at once, that there might just be a universal harmony vibrating softly in the background for us all to hear, if we listen closely.
Or hell, maybe it’s not all that. Maybe it’s just interesting people doing weird things, and it’s worth going along for the ride since the man telling their story can crack out a snappy sentence and a quip.
But no, I think there’s more here.
The author tells these stories with an intoxicating blend of fine-tuned prose, poetic imagery and genuine down-to-earth frankness, and the novel succeeds by dialing in that balance. Will walks a rather thin line, craftily navigating threads of despair, hope, and absurdity, and shows the reader that there can exist an important intersection where those deep, conflicting feelings can shine all at once, that there might just be a universal harmony vibrating softly in the background for us all to hear, if we listen closely.
Or hell, maybe it’s not all that. Maybe it’s just interesting people doing weird things, and it’s worth going along for the ride since the man telling their story can crack out a snappy sentence and a quip.
But no, I think there’s more here.
January 7, 2023
In an interview from 2016, Will McGrath wrote of a tension with memoir-ish writing. "To tell the story well you have to find the right balance: the further out from the event, the more perspective you have, the more life experience, the more actual practice at being a writer – but the further you go there’s also less immediacy, less urgency, less specificity of detail" (https://bwr.ua.edu/contest-2015-an-in...)
This collection of essays from McGrath, fuses his experience with an external memoir of a marginalized person , and it makes for a beautiful and layered experience. His writing has poetic layers but with clarity about the deep pains experiences by subjects. The overriding concept appears to be about making visible the people who have only been placed in shadows. Sex workers, homeless, economically disadvantaged, and those broken from family are all portrayed here.
"Death of a Virgin" tells two stories. One is about the a grizzly undoing of young lovers in Arizona by predatory criminals. The other story is about the artistry and criminally of the visual artist Caravaggio. These two stories are separated by time and cultural impact, but both seem to pick away at making sense from unvarnished life experience.
Formal structure is reduced here. Some memoirs are snippets of a whole ("Hallucination: Donut Shop") or reduced versions of a book (Peanut's Odyssey). Some deal with racial reckonings "A Noose in Hentiebaai", or modern absurdities (Hallucination: Active Shooter). Sometimes the connect between the stories feels tenuous, but an ethnographic journey through the lens of forgotten people could describe it.
Like any collection of stories, some are really fantastic, and some are forgettable. McGrath 's batting average is more than good . Many of these stories capture truth in unusual places such as an Elvis Convention or road trip in Lesotho. There isn't a lot of "why" here or weaving together of a grand narrative. Still, it's confidence, specificity, and investigative/tourism mash-up make it an unforgettable read.
This collection of essays from McGrath, fuses his experience with an external memoir of a marginalized person , and it makes for a beautiful and layered experience. His writing has poetic layers but with clarity about the deep pains experiences by subjects. The overriding concept appears to be about making visible the people who have only been placed in shadows. Sex workers, homeless, economically disadvantaged, and those broken from family are all portrayed here.
"Death of a Virgin" tells two stories. One is about the a grizzly undoing of young lovers in Arizona by predatory criminals. The other story is about the artistry and criminally of the visual artist Caravaggio. These two stories are separated by time and cultural impact, but both seem to pick away at making sense from unvarnished life experience.
Formal structure is reduced here. Some memoirs are snippets of a whole ("Hallucination: Donut Shop") or reduced versions of a book (Peanut's Odyssey). Some deal with racial reckonings "A Noose in Hentiebaai", or modern absurdities (Hallucination: Active Shooter). Sometimes the connect between the stories feels tenuous, but an ethnographic journey through the lens of forgotten people could describe it.
Like any collection of stories, some are really fantastic, and some are forgettable. McGrath 's batting average is more than good . Many of these stories capture truth in unusual places such as an Elvis Convention or road trip in Lesotho. There isn't a lot of "why" here or weaving together of a grand narrative. Still, it's confidence, specificity, and investigative/tourism mash-up make it an unforgettable read.
November 28, 2022
Loved this book. Such good stories and reflections on really powerful and really mundane moments. It's so clear McGrath is working through these events with the reader, offering no simple conclusions but inviting you to share the experience.
September 26, 2022
One of the most beautiful compilations of essays I’ve ever read. Will McGrath is a treasure!
April 15, 2023
Through this series of essays, the author gives us small snapshots of life that are illuminating well beyond the scope of each story. This lens of the author's life reminds us of the great power of human connection, story-telling, and words themselves, occasionally providing us with retrospective observations of impacts beyond when the stories were written. I highly recommend this to anyone.
March 4, 2023
With "Farewell Transmission: Notes from Hidden Spaces," Will McGrath offers a series of graceful essays taking us from the mountains of Lesotho to life outside a Phoenix homeless shelter.
McGrath is a thoughtful guide. He's open enough to enjoy the pleasures of Elvis impersonators and church-basement wrestling matches, but he's mindful of the depths beneath: a friend stabbed by his own brother in Lesotho, a homeless client embarking on one last bender as he fades out of life.
The author is open with his sympathies. He calls out a racist mine manager who invites him to watch a rugby match and chews out hospital workers who judge his client for turning back to cocaine on a terminal diagnosis. It's easy to agree with McGrath, but while it's understandable he doesn't extend the same graciousness to his foes as his friends, it also feels like a missed opportunity in essays of this caliber. As he notes, he drank the mine manager's beer, ate his food...and waited until they'd parted ways to write an essay calling out the man's racism.
That said, the stories here are warm and memorable. Perhaps the standout is "Keyhole to Sana'a," which shares how a sister-in-law's lost iPhone made its way to Yemen, where it offered a window into a different world via photos uploaded by a teenage boy into a shared iCloud account. McGarth turns a personal connection into a geopolitical one, delicately linking the threads between this boy's life and the civil war that may have consumed him. It's a sensitive story carefully told, one that's well at home in this excellent collection.
Quotes
"Elvis is a stocky First National man with a thick watermelon gut, thick gold sunglasses, thick black pomp. Very quickly he is sweating hard, aiming for verisimilitude that would make the King proud. His pipes are rich baritone and listening to him is an experience not unlike being rubbed in butter."
"Come Friday night, the two of us stormed into the Legion, hot for combat. We swept past the horseshoe bar and into the packed community hall, the crowd adorned in flannel, camo, blaze orange, plaid, and Carhartt, all the shades of Minnesota's rainbow."
"Professional wrestling occupies a sui generis space in the culture, a strange nexus where "Star Wars"-quoting nerds and juiced-up gym rats might share space together and may in fact be the same person. It is one of the unique American artforms, like jazz, or comic books, or endowing corporations with the legal rights of people."
McGrath is a thoughtful guide. He's open enough to enjoy the pleasures of Elvis impersonators and church-basement wrestling matches, but he's mindful of the depths beneath: a friend stabbed by his own brother in Lesotho, a homeless client embarking on one last bender as he fades out of life.
The author is open with his sympathies. He calls out a racist mine manager who invites him to watch a rugby match and chews out hospital workers who judge his client for turning back to cocaine on a terminal diagnosis. It's easy to agree with McGrath, but while it's understandable he doesn't extend the same graciousness to his foes as his friends, it also feels like a missed opportunity in essays of this caliber. As he notes, he drank the mine manager's beer, ate his food...and waited until they'd parted ways to write an essay calling out the man's racism.
That said, the stories here are warm and memorable. Perhaps the standout is "Keyhole to Sana'a," which shares how a sister-in-law's lost iPhone made its way to Yemen, where it offered a window into a different world via photos uploaded by a teenage boy into a shared iCloud account. McGarth turns a personal connection into a geopolitical one, delicately linking the threads between this boy's life and the civil war that may have consumed him. It's a sensitive story carefully told, one that's well at home in this excellent collection.
Quotes
"Elvis is a stocky First National man with a thick watermelon gut, thick gold sunglasses, thick black pomp. Very quickly he is sweating hard, aiming for verisimilitude that would make the King proud. His pipes are rich baritone and listening to him is an experience not unlike being rubbed in butter."
"Come Friday night, the two of us stormed into the Legion, hot for combat. We swept past the horseshoe bar and into the packed community hall, the crowd adorned in flannel, camo, blaze orange, plaid, and Carhartt, all the shades of Minnesota's rainbow."
"Professional wrestling occupies a sui generis space in the culture, a strange nexus where "Star Wars"-quoting nerds and juiced-up gym rats might share space together and may in fact be the same person. It is one of the unique American artforms, like jazz, or comic books, or endowing corporations with the legal rights of people."
September 20, 2023
Prior to reading this book I'd come to think (somewhat lazily) that there are two categories of travel writers: the hardship junkies like Krakauer and Junger, who are admirable, but can be exhausting, and the humorists like Bill Bryson and Helen Russell, who have a grand time in fun places. Will McGrath oscillates between both, finding humor in dark places and meaning in light ones. He reminds me of the good old days of travel writing from Men's Journal, which were often able to bridge the need for both humor and meaning, and of David Foster Wallace's travel essays, mixing absurdity with moments of pain and unexpectedly elegant writing. I came away from the book fully convinced that regional pro wrestling is an essential social event and that there is nothing better than being "filled equally with pride and donuts". The moment I read that donut line I was in for the rest of the book. Glad I stuck around.
March 14, 2023
McGrath seems to collect experiences of being in the right place at the right time. An interesting collection of ethnographic essays, but ultimately it floundered to reach a specific perspective or point.
September 12, 2023
Engrossing essays both domestic and foreign. I was engrossed in the tale of the lost phone ending up in Yemen (Keyhole to Sanaa) and the photos that it turned up. Multiple Elvises in Ontario featured in The Kings of Simcoe County. There were a couple of ghost stories here too!
January 25, 2023
Almost certainly will be my most interesting, illuminating, and unique read of the year. And all by writing about things that are profoundly commonplace and relatable.
March 1, 2023
Simply exceptional.
June 4, 2023
absolutely loved some of these essays, couldn't bring myself to finish others
January 9, 2026
Each story is such a surprise. I couldn’t wait to find out what the next essay topic would be. The stories kept me on my toes, the writing kept me engaged.
October 17, 2025
Lesotho
Meh
Didn’t connect with the characters
Meh
Didn’t connect with the characters
December 11, 2022
Reminded me so much of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead. There are definitely a handful of REALLY powerful travel essays but it’s much more than that. The Elvis impersonator piece was really sweet. Ate up the pro wrestling piece as well. My other favorite essays were centered around a stolen iPhone, a racist statue, and McGrath’s experience working with a particularly memorable homeless man.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews