Jack Beatty is a young college student who dreams of directing movies, despite having never left Minnesota. When he's not in class, he drinks and smokes with his roommate and hosts weekly parties in the backwoods of their small town. His father never left Minnesota either, and he's convinced that the Beatty's are cursed. Stifled by his own inaction, Jack suspects his old man might be right. He wonders if he'll ever amount to anything; his father never did, despite his own youthful dreams.

But things change in the late summer of 2012, when his friend Fletcher invites him on a road trip to California with another friend, Oliver "Conny" Conrad. While Conny thinks it's a chance for the gang to reconnect, Fletcher is just going for a girl he knows in Los Angeles. But Jack also knows a girl there, a fellow dreamer named Helen. Stunned by Fletcher's invitation, Jack knows that despite his Midwest-bound paralysis, California is the one place he must finally go-across the storied American West, on the road and into the electrifying new.

A bittersweet, luminous debut that channels the restless spirit of Kerouac and the unflinching honesty of Carver, Into the Beautiful West is a story about breaking free from the sins of your father, finding the courage to want something more, the gap between performance and the authentic self, and discovering that the hardest river to cross is the one that rushes defiant against your own failures-and family curses.