First Light Books welcomes County Highway to the shop—a magazine about America in the form of a 19th century newspaper. After a happy hour to mingle with your fellow newsstans, founder and editor David Samuels will be in conversation with contributing writer Meaghan Garvey.

County Highway merch will be exclusively available to attendees with the purchase of an issue, or of two forthcoming titles from their new publishing imprints: Bloodline by Lee Clay Johnson and Life Sentences by Martin Mull.

This event is free to attend; RSVPs are encouraged.

About the publication

Wherever there’s a stop sign, there’s a story.

Started on a shoestring by three friends (David Samuels, Walter Kirn, and Ryan Baesemann) in the wake of the pandemic, County Highway has since become the fastest growing print periodical in the country—earning an annual circulation of 150,000 copies barely one year after releasing its debut issue. 

The name is inspired by what they believe is the perfect-sized place for the enhancement of life and art. A county is a chunk of earth big enough to allow for a variety of human types, but small enough to get to know a decent number of one's neighbors—where they come from, what they’re proud of, what they fear, what they smoke, what they drink, and what they love. The county where this newspaper is located is somewhere between all those places, real and imaginary. It’s the scale of the place that’s important, and also the idea of traveling from one to another with an eye towards finding new answers to the founding American questions of who we are and why we are here. 

County Highway features 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. Offering a roadside banquet of American humor, common-speech, and social and political insights in every issue, it prints six times each year for readers across all fifty states and Canada.

About the featured guests

David Samuels is editor and co-founder of County Highway. He had a long career as a staff and contract writer for The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The Point, and other magazines, on subjects including dog tracks, music festivals, blimp pilots, serial impostors, jewel thieves, pigeon racing, and the art of bringing down large buildings with explosives. He also reported on wars in the Balkans and the Middle East, where he learned the importance of gun safety. He is currently restoring a gold 1985 Porsche 924 that he bought off a guy who found it in a barn. 

Meaghan Garvey is a writer and illustrator living on the beach in the Midwest. She’s a contributing writer to County Highway, with bylines in Pitchfork, NPR, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Tablet, and Vulture, and many other outlets. Her debut book Midwestern Death Trip will be published by Panamerica Books in 2026.