The Impossible aims to get skateboarding right. Journalist Cole Louison gets inside the history, culture, and major personalities of skating. The first true journalistic history of skateboarding and its culture.
Cole Louison is a writer for GQ magazine and has contributed to Fader, McSweeneys, the New York Times, Buzzsaw and All Things Considered. While at Ithaca Colleges Park School of Communications, Louison majored in journalism and reported for the Ithacan and the Ithacan Journal. He also helped found one of the top alternative college publications: Buzzsaw Haircut.
Upon graduation, Louison moved to Martha’s Vineyard and began reporting for the Vineyard Gazette. While there, he became an island correspondent for WGBH Boston NPR and later moved to Cape Cod to work further for the station.
After a year on the Cape, a Vermont art colony offered him a writing grant, moving him to Johnson, Vermont. The one-month residency turned into a job offer, and Louison spent a year in Vermont before selling his truck and moving to New York City in fall 2004. Once there he became an editor at McSweeney’s Quarterly Journal, joined the New Yorker softball team, and temped for Vogue, Esquire, and Vanity Fair before coming to GQ, where he works today while continuing to write on a freelance basis.
For GQ he has covered a variety of subjects and interviewed Bill Clinton, Reggie Miller, Dave Navarro, Big Boi, Mohammad Ali, Ted Nugent, Don King, David Remnick, the world authority on Samuel Beckett, Jim Jarmusch, and Jean-Claude Killy. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, Outside, and the Los Angeles Times.
“David Foster Wallace on a skateboard.” — GQ
“With its infectious enthusiasm, precise lyricism, and rigorous deeply-felt reporting, the book brings to life the sport’s historical roots, its cultural significance, and most of all, its artistic possibilities. I was hooked from the start. —Ian Crouch, The New Yorker
“The last time I thought seriously about professional skateboarders, I was hoping to become one. This book blew it wide open for me. Until now, only obsessive freaks had any idea how interesting this sport is. And even obsessive freaks should stick around for the tale Louison has so lucidly spun. —John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Blood Horses and Pulphead
“I’d never so much as stood on a board, let alone heard the names Sheckler and Mullen, but I found myself entranced by the fascinating cultural movement they created. The Impossible is a universal story, told in imminently readable fashion by a tremendously talented writer." --Michael Koryta, New York Times best-selling author of The Ridge and Those Who Wish Me Dead
“The book provides a deep and nuanced insight into how contemporary skateboarding has evolved and where it will go. It honors the beauty, danger, and complexity of the sport, and lays bare its physical and psychological demands, and greatness. The Impossible is some of the finest writing on skating I’ve seen. I read it in one sitting." —Bret Anthony Johnston, best-selling author of Corpus Christi and Remember Me Like This
