So Cal: Dispatches from the End of the World is available now.

The new collection is a wide-ranging survey of Southern California-centric characters, capers and aesthetics.

The thing about Joe is he’s so busy championing his friends, it’s easy to forget what a great writer he is. Reading through the pieces that follow, I was floored by his ability to breathe freshness into every scene and description. Sometimes the more work the artist produces, the more the tropes/defaults/repetitions become glaring. Not the case here.
–Jamie Brisick, from the Foreword

In place, character, and experience, Donnelly’s latest collection is sharp in observation and dripping in bona fides. Blessed with the skill set of decades working in hard-nosed journalism, as well as the when-where-who discerning eye of someone comfortable on the fringes, each and every story lets loose the controls and leads you down backroads, both literal and figurative, you’d never sniff out otherwise. Soon Cal and its author is definitive of a region that rails against definition—even as he drags the reader up and down and out and away and back again.
–Whitman Bedwell, editor in chief, The Surfer’s Journal

Pieces include: “The Loneliest Road,” “Magic and Loss,” “Future Man,” “Father Pop,” “GoldsteinLand,” “Messiah Wolf,” “The Tortoise and the Tank”, characters include, Shaun Tomson, Danny Kwock, Jim Evans, Mike Salisbury, Tommy Caldwell, Luke Perry, Craig Stecyk, Puff the insurgent + wolf OR-7, crawfish Iko, German Shepherd Max, writers, and much more.

Hope you can get a little So Cal in your life.