The Lost Book of Mormon A Quest for the Book That Just Might Be the Great American Novel

Is The Book of Mormon a Great American Novel? Avi Steinberg thinks so. In this quirky travelogue—part fan nonfiction, part personal quest—he follows the trail laid out in Joseph Smith’s book. From Jerusalem to the ruined Mayan cities of Central America to upstate New York and, finally, to Jackson County, Missouri—the spot Smith identified as the site of the Garden of Eden—Steinberg traces The Book’s unexpected path and grapples with Joseph Smith’s demons—and his own. Literate and funny, personal and provocative, the genre-bending The Lost Book of Mormon boldly explores our deeply human impulse to write books, and affirms the abiding power of story.

Avi Steinberg is the author of Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian, which was a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker’s Culture Desk blog. His essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Salon, The Paris Review Daily, and n+1.