Adam Gnade is best known for his 2022 book, After Tonight Everything Will Be Different, a lovely rumination on friendships and food. He’s made a career of loosely chronicling his life as an artist, writer, and musician, along with the communities he has either created or engaged.
His ability to weave casual, startling observations about life and love into spaces like corporate offices, punk rock house shows, and independent book tours has earned him a following, and rightfully so. If you are of a certain age and know his references, his work resonates with observers and processors like Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard. While Minutemen asserted their band could be your life, Gnade’s prose could be that, too.
Wild Horse Shit is another collection focused on the things that make life worth living: friends, family, art, and purpose. Gnade has always been a keen observer of people and place, with a talent for capturing every underattended reading, every cold floor he sleeps on, and every electric moment that happens to make the other parts bearable, and there is plenty of that here. Describing the repetition of driving through the middle of the country, he explains, “It’s desperation, predatory industry, faded billboards for divorce attorneys, bleak highways, the lonely scepter of a pale blue waterpower as you drive into town, signs of decay, years of drought.”
Part of Wild Horse Shit takes place during a gathering of writer friends his fictional stand-in, James, has collected along the way. James wants his friends, some of whom are visiting from outside of America, to experience the good things about the country, not the people who make the rules. This section crackles with joy and a sincere appreciation for others’ talents, and that’s one of the aspects that is so endearing. One wishes the authors were listed by their real names to make finding them a little easier.
What is unexpected and even more powerful about Wild Horse Shit is that Gnade interrogates key questions of the current situation: How do you reckon with the gap between the America you learned about in school and the America you live in now? How can you do things you love without feeling terrible about what the rest of the world is going through?
The events of the novel occur in the weeks before the 2024 election, and the inevitability of a second term of Donald Trump hangs heavily over the proceedings. That push and pull of a need for release and the related guilt of taking it is a central theme. At one point, James/Gnade says, “That said, I’m of two minds, because I know how hard it is to be a person in this bleak, sad age. You can’t blame anyone for taking an easy path in the name of self-protection. Still, the people I know with the biggest obstacles are the ones most willing to take a chance.”
It is tough to engage with the world in all its exhaustive provocations, but if we don’t keep trying, the losses are greater. Indeed, it can feel indulgent to experience joy with so much suffering, and even sillier to share that with others, but that’s actually what we need right now, argues Gnade. Our loves, our passions, and our people are the stuff that keeps us recharged to fight again and helps everyone we try to help. We need fuel for the fight, even if it feels indulgent or selfish. We are here to love and be loved, and we must make time for it to keep ourselves human.
At one point, while discussing kindness and weakness, James mentions that he’s been spending a lot of time listening to Silver Jews, referencing a line from one of their songs: “I’m gonna shine out in the wild kindness”. In a world where we are bucketed into a series of either/or propositions, Gnade asserts that this is too simple for humanity, that being wild and gentle is the way.
He explains, “The very best people make you feel as if everything is in its right place. They set order to the chaos while the destructive agents of opposition seek to tear it back apart”, and later in the same section, “When kindness runs contrary to the spirit of the age, to be kind is to be lawless”. This sentiment recalls the meme, “In an age of performative cruelty, kindness is punk as fuck” in the best way: open-hearted, but not sentimental. Despite the harrowing times we live in, Gnade can conjure sincere, measured optimism, and that might be enough to keep us going for another day.
It’s difficult to capture life in real time. In summer 2025, filmmaker Ari Aster tried to pick at our pandemic scars with Eddington, and all he could muster was a shrug and “both sides suck”. One of Gnade’s contemporaries, filmmaker and author Jon Nix, did everything Aster tried to do in a brief, powerful novella, The Right Side of Bad, which I also highly recommend. Nix’s spare prose, however, runs circles around Aster’s bluster. Yet Gnade is equally skilled at getting to the point: “We’re parched is what I want to say. We’re dry as a goddamn paper-thin skull in the desert. Don’t let us down, because we’ve been let down enough. Help us remember how sweet and good life can be.”
Wild Horse Shit can be seen as a thematic piece with Superchunk’s 2022 album, Wild Loneliness, both works reckoning with our new normal. Gnade’s advice is to love people hard, cling to the good times, and be brave enough to be kind and wild in the face of evil. In sum: do your own titular Wild Horse Shit. It might be the message you need to hear most right now. Indeed, with Wild Horse Shit, the indie author offers a salve of a novel that addresses our trying times.