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|---|---|
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Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus |
| Original language | |
| English | |
WHY VISIT AMERICA
Stories
The citizens of Plainfield, TX, a tiny town that "couldn't even be plotted onto your basic left-right binary," have had it with the United States, "that broke-down country." So they vote to secede, rename themselves America "in memory of our former country," and happily set themselves up to receive tourists from their closest neighbor. America.
Couldn't happen? Well, it might, and so it goes in the thirteen stories in Matthew Baker's brilliantly illuminating, incisive, and heartbreaking collection WHY VISIT AMERICA. A young man breaks the news to his family that he is going to transition - from an analog body to a digital existence. A young woman abducts a child - her own - from a government-run childcare facility. A man returns home after committing a great crime, his sentence being that his memory - his entire life - is wiped clean. Employing an exhilarating range of genres, Baker takes the issues confronting so many of us - from old age to runaway consumer culture, from immigration to infertility- and with truly innovative language and a very deep heart, makes us think about them in a new way.
Margaret Atwood recently commented that "[i]n science fiction, it's always about now. What else could it be about? There is no future. There are many possibilities, but we do not know which one we are going to have." WHY VISIT AMERICA is about these possibilities: an exegesis of our current political predicament, a warning for where we might be headed, and an eloquent plea for connection and the understanding of, as one character terms it, those who are "othery."
Matthew Baker is author of the story collection Hybrid Creatures and the children's novel If You Find This, and his stories have appeared in publications such as American Short Fiction, New England Review, and many others. He currently lives in New York City, where he teaches at New York University.
Four different stories from this collection are under active option for film.
A Sarah Burnes Book for the Gernert Company.
Couldn't happen? Well, it might, and so it goes in the thirteen stories in Matthew Baker's brilliantly illuminating, incisive, and heartbreaking collection WHY VISIT AMERICA. A young man breaks the news to his family that he is going to transition - from an analog body to a digital existence. A young woman abducts a child - her own - from a government-run childcare facility. A man returns home after committing a great crime, his sentence being that his memory - his entire life - is wiped clean. Employing an exhilarating range of genres, Baker takes the issues confronting so many of us - from old age to runaway consumer culture, from immigration to infertility- and with truly innovative language and a very deep heart, makes us think about them in a new way.
Margaret Atwood recently commented that "[i]n science fiction, it's always about now. What else could it be about? There is no future. There are many possibilities, but we do not know which one we are going to have." WHY VISIT AMERICA is about these possibilities: an exegesis of our current political predicament, a warning for where we might be headed, and an eloquent plea for connection and the understanding of, as one character terms it, those who are "othery."
Matthew Baker is author of the story collection Hybrid Creatures and the children's novel If You Find This, and his stories have appeared in publications such as American Short Fiction, New England Review, and many others. He currently lives in New York City, where he teaches at New York University.
Four different stories from this collection are under active option for film.
A Sarah Burnes Book for the Gernert Company.
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Book
Published 2020-08-01 by Henry Holt |