When a car smashes into a sculpture of a giant cowgirl, the police find two bodies in the trunk. Nineteen-year-old Nick Toussaint Jr. is arrested for murder. As the details of the crime rip across the Internet, his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Emily Portis, is nearly consumed by a public hungry for every lurid detail, accurate or not. Rosecrans Baldwin's The Last Kid Left is a bold, searching novel about how our relationships operate in a hyper-connected world, about a tragedy turned mercilessly into entertainment. And it's the suspenseful unwinding of a crime that's more complex than it initially seems. But mostly it's the story of two teenagers, dismantled by circumstances and rotten luck, who are desperate to believe that love is enough to save them. - For readers of Christopher J. Yates and Noah Hawley - One of Entertainment Weekly's Best Books of the Month

A LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER. NAMED A BEST CALIFORNIA BOOKS OF 2021 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES A provocative, exhilaratingly new understanding of the United States' most confounding metropolis--not just a great city, but a full-blown modern city-state America is obsessed with Los Angeles. And America has been thinking about Los Angeles all wrong, for decades, on repeat. Los Angeles is not just the place where the American dream hits the Pacific. (It has its own dreams.) Not just the vanishing point of America's western drive. (It has its own compass.) Functionally, aesthetically, mythologically, even technologically, an independent territory, defined less by distinct borders than by an aura of autonomy and a sense of unfurling destiny--this is the city-state of Los Angeles. Deeply reported and researched, provocatively argued, and eloquently written, Rosecrans Baldwin's Everything Now approaches the metropolis from unexpected angles, nimbly interleaving his own voice with a chorus of others, from canonical L.A. literature to everyday citizens. Here, Octavia E. Butler and Joan Didion are in conversation with activists and astronauts, vampires and veterans. Baldwin records the stories of countless Angelenos, discovering people both upended and reborn: by disasters natural and economic, following gospels of wealth or self-help or personal destiny. The result is a story of a kaleidoscopic, vibrant nation unto itself--vastly more than its many, many parts. Baldwin's concept of the city-state allows us, finally, to grasp a place--Los Angeles--whose idiosyncrasies both magnify those of America, and are so fully its own. Here, space and time don't quite work the same as they do elsewhere, and contradictions are as stark as southern California's natural environment. Perhaps no better place exists to watch the United States's past, and its possible futures, play themselves out. Welcome to Los Angeles, the Great American City-State.

A self-described Francophile since the age of nine, Rosecrans Baldwin had always dreamed of living in France. So when an offer presented itself to work at a Parisian ad agency, he couldn't turn it down even though he had no experience in advertising, and even though he hardly spoke French.But the Paris that Rosecrans and his wife, Rachel, arrived in wasn't the romantic city he remembered, and over the next eighteen months, his dogged American optimism was put to the test: at work (where he wrote booklets on breastfeeding), at home (in the hub of a massive construction project), and at every confusing dinner party in between. A hilarious and refreshingly honest look at one of our most beloved cities, "Paris, I Love You" is the story of a young man whose preconceptions are usurped by the oddities of a vigorous, nervy metropolis which is just what he needs to fall in love with Paris a second time."