County Highway

media release: This summer, County Highway is taking to the road for its first ever roadshow, a two-month-long tour featuring readings, discussion, and a meet-and-greet with the newspaper’s editors and contributing writers at 35 different locations around the country.

The tour debuts on July 8 with our friends at Next Chapter Booksellers in St. Paul, hosted by managing editor Ryan Baesemann and natural remedies columnist Amanda Fortini.

Baesemann and Fortini will discuss County Highway and its founding vision, read from their recent and forthcoming work, introduce Panamerica — our new publishing house — and close with an open Q&A with the audience. Come meet the folks who put County Highway together and be a part of a greater discourse on the state of the American literary tradition.

Next stops on the tour include:

7/9 – Madison — Leopold’s, 5:30 pm

7/10 – Lake Geneva — Lake Geneva Episcopal Parish

7/11 – Milwaukee — Lion’s Tooth

7/12 – Chicago — Quimby’s (with contributing writer Meaghan Garvey joining)

ABOUT COUNTY HIGHWAY

Founded by David Samuels, Walter Kirn, and Ryan Baesemann in the wake of the pandemic, County Highway is a magazine about America in the form of a 19th-century newspaper. Printed six times a year and distributed across all fifty states and Canada, County Highway is a print-only publication — a leader in the return to print. It has reached an annual circulation of 150,000 in just over a year, with over 20,000 subscribers and bookstand readers, with a particular strength among Gen X readers — a testament to the heartiness of the printed word and the American voice. County Highway’s notable contributors include novelist Walter Kirn; former Harper’s editor and New Yorker writer David Samuels; fiction writers Will Self, Jim Shepard and Tama Janowitz; Krist Novoselic of Nirvana; Ian Frazier; and ordinary Americans with stories to tell.

Dubbed “America’s Only Newspaper,” we feature hairy off-road adventures by some of America's best and strangest writers; reports on the myriad of political and spiritual crises that are gripping our country and their deeper cultural and historical sources; regular columns about agriculture, civil liberties, animals, herbal medicine, and living off the grid, both mentally and physically; essays about literature and art; and an entire section devoted to music. Our pages offer a road-side banquet of American humor, common-speech, and social and political insights in every issue, and have proven that wherever there’s a stop sign, there’s a story.

ABOUT PANAMERICA

Panamerica is a home for the American voice in the genres of literary fiction and reportage. We publish books that highlight what is most distinctive about American writing, including the mix of high and low subject matter and voices; deadpan and absurdist humor; the tragedies and triumphs of ordinary people living alongside their neighbors; and the ability to invent and inhabit new worlds. Bloodline, a novel by Lee Clay Johnson, is the first Panamerica title published July 4, 2025. It is available for purchase online and from select bookstores across the country.