Funny and heartfelt, this amalgamation of memoir and essay collection tells the story of twenty months the author spent in Lesotho, the small, landlocked kingdom surrounded by South Africa. There he finds a spirit of joyful absurdity and resolve, surrounded by people who take strangers’ hands as they walk down the road, people who—with sweetest face—drop the dirtiest jokes in the southern hemisphere. But Lesotho is also a place where shepherds exact Old Testament retribution, where wounded...

In Farewell Transmission, Will McGrath guides us on a rambling quest into the enlightenment of other lives. Funny and weird, heartbreaking and galvanizing, these essays take us from Yemen to Lesotho to the Bronx and beyond. We find Caravaggio at an Arizona homeless shelter and Elvis in rural Canada. We meet street preachers and diamond miners and professional wrestlers and ex-cons—those wilderness prophets too frequently cropped from the picture and pushed out of the frame.

AIDS has devastated communities across southern Africa. In Lesotho, where a quarter of adults are infected, the wide-ranging implications of the disease have been felt in every family, disrupting key aspects of social life. In Infected Kin, Ellen Block and Will McGrath argue that AIDS is fundamentally a kinship disease, examining the ways it transcends infected individuals and seeps into kin relations and networks of care. While much AIDS scholarship has turned away from the diffi...