Seventy years ago, the U.S. government – via its Federal Writers’ Project – funded the creation of the American Guide Series, a collection of books and pamphlets about every state in the union at that time. (Hard copies are hard to come by now, but I found the Nevada one on Google Books.)

Inspired by this social project, editors Sean Wilsey (New Yorker, McSweeney’s) and Matt Weiland (The Paris Review) compiled State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, a book of new essays by contemporary authors about every state in the union. Here’s a sampling of the contents:

• California by William T. Vollmann

• Illinois by Dave Eggers

• Massachusetts by John Hodgman

• Montana by Sarah Vowell

• Nevada by Charles Bock

• New Jersey by Anthony Bourdain

• Ohio by Susan Orlean

• Rhode Island by Jhumpa Lahiri

I read a few chapters on Amazon, and unlike their FDR-era counterparts, many of the essays – perhaps due to the space constraints – are rather narrowly focused. Bock’s Nevada piece, for instance, is a brief memoir about the pawn shop owned by his parents (now run by his brother) near downtown Las Vegas. Vollmann’s piece, on the other hand, somehow manages to capture the grandeur of the entire state of California, from poetic descriptions of its landscapes to an S&M joint in San Francisco. The beginning of his essay touches upon the purpose of the book:

It says something about our changing America that once upon a time, an art-friendly governmental organization commissioned one volume about each of our fifty states; whereas this book, inspired by the WPA’s example, has been commercially published and allows each state only a few thousand words. Fortunately, mass culture, with its big box warehouses of the landscape, language, and mind itself, has already destroyed so many differences between states that there is less to say anyhow.

Based on the fact that Vollmann’s next book, Imperial, contains 1,300 pages about one county in California, my guess is that his last point is somewhat facetious.