Young Love and Rucksack Travels in Post-9/11 America: New York and Westward During the Politically Charged Summer of 2004
A telling story of a country caught up in the aimless materialism of a real estate bubble, WEST OF 16W follows the romance and travails of a man in his late 20’s, as he and his friends chase their unconventional aspirations in an era dominated by apathy, materialism, and self-interest. Meet Mark, the son of immigrants, whose need to fulfill familial expectations led to a life of hard study culminating in a Ph.D. by his mid-20's. Yet underneath the disciplined scientist facade, Mark had always dreamed of traveling the country and writing great novels. And so, with diploma in hand and love life in shambles, Mark hits the road to explore his long-suppressed literary aspirations. Set amongst the fear and uncertainty of post-9/11 America and the charged summer of the 2004 Republican Convention in New York, WEST OF 16W takes us into the quarter-life crisis of a young man struggling to maintain his idealism, as told through the scrolling tableau of the American landscape. From the deep south of Charleston, to his North Jersey hometown in the shadow of Manhattan, to the west coast by bus, the novel is as much an introspective journey as cross-country adventure as Mark seeks balance between familial expectations, personal aspirations, and the affection of the woman he loves.
Those evenings with friends at the nearby barrier island beaches of Folly or Sullivan’s Island, always taking me back to summer nights in Seaside Heights New Jersey and sitting bayside on dock slips with Nicole, starring west to the lights of America mainland twinkling before us. “You know Mark,” she would philosophize wispily, “we have the entire continent before us...” Indeed! And what a thought! The immensity of all America across the narrow bay, incomprehensibly huge to two specs of humanity floating off the coast on a tiny, sand-spit sliver of land! Such sudden freedom of youth and young love that inspired a young man to get him and his girl in a car right then and there, cross that bridge, and see all there was to be seen in those thousands of miles of raw land that swelled, broke, and roiled up again in tremendous peaks which met the immensity of blue Pacific.
About Mark Slomiany
MARK SLOMIANY was raised in Rutherford, NJ. Writing out of the first generation Polish-American experience, he was profoundly influenced from a young age by the poetry of Rutherford's William Carlos Williams and the novels of Jack Kerouac. A graduate of Washington and Lee University and the Medical University of South Carolina, Mark continues to reside in Charleston as an assistant professor at the state's medical university.
Contact him at markslomiany@gmail.com with questions/comments.
Young Love and Rucksack Travels in Post-9/11 America: New York and Westward During the Politically Charged Summer of 2004 
MARK SLOMIANY was raised in Rutherford, NJ. Writing out of the first generation Polish-American experience, he was profoundly influenced from a young age by the poetry of Rutherford's William Carlos Williams and the novels of Jack Kerouac. A graduate of Washington and Lee University and the Medical University of South Carolina, Mark continues to reside in Charleston as an assistant professor at the state's medical university.