The tips of his mustache were so long and pointy they almost looked prehensile, like they might reach out and take things off store shelves.

First, get yourself a car. You won’t be able to survive here without one. Go to the rental desk. The clerk will be curious to know why you are here, all the way from wherever you have come; tell him.

Drive for fifteen minutes in any direction and the city will begin to blend with the country. You’ll think you’ve left town, but you haven’t. Not even close. It will take many more miles of driving, much more open country, before you’ll see a sign that says, out of nowhere, LEAVING OKLAHOMA CITY.

The city decided it needed to be bigger, so—for absolutely no good reason—it annexed enough land to make itself the largest city, by land area, in the entire world.

He fired. Boom. Kelley died in a gigantic pool of blood just off of First Street. This incident—along with many others more or less like it—titillated local newspaper readers for weeks. Oklahoma City police officer Joe Burnett was now the killer of the killer of the killer of Jesse James.

This book is a history of Oklahoma City. That may strike you as unnecessary, or unfortunate. If so, I would understand. In the larger economy of American attention, Oklahoma City’s main job has always been to be ignored. When non-Oklahomans need to think about the place, we tend to fall back on clichés: tepees, wagon trains, the Dust Bowl, country

I’d like to thank my agent, Jay Mandel,

It is an unlikely, unreasonable, and arbitrary place, a city that came into being outside of the normal run of history—and so, in a sense, a pure city. For the purposes of this book, and with apologies to Charleston, Austin, the Portlands, Fort Worth, Indianapolis, Chattanooga, Charlotte, Memphis, San Antonio, and of course Seattle (always special

Deafheaven, whose album Sunbather played on a loop in my headphones for years as I wrote and revised this book.