About this item
A fierce, searing response to the chaos of the war on terror--an utterly original and blackly comic debutIn the early years of the Iraq War, a severely burned boy appears on a remote rock formation in the Akkad Valley. A shadowy, powerful group within the U.S. government speculates Who is he? Where did he come from? And, crucially, what does he know? In pursuit of that information, an interrogator is summoned from his prison cell, and a hideous and forgotten apparatus of torture, which extracts perfect confessions, is retrieved from the vaults. Over the course of four days, a cavalcade of voices rises up from the Akkad boy, each one striving to tell his or her own story. Some of these voices are familiar Osama bin Laden, L. Paul Bremer, Condoleezza Rice, Mark Zuckerberg.
About the Author
Mark Doten's novel Trump Sky Alpha is forthcoming from Graywolf Press. He is the author of a previous novel, The Infernal, and was named to Granta's once-a-decade "Best of Young American Novelists" list in 2017. He wrote the libretto for the oratorio The Source, which had its world pre- miere at BAM's Next Wave Festival in October 2014 and was called a "21st-century masterpiece" by the New York Times. It was later staged by the Los Angeles Opera and the San Francisco Opera. He is the executive literary fiction editor at Soho Press and teaches in Columbia University's graduate writing program. He lives in Princeton, NJ.
