Jeffrey Rotter

"A darkly comic, wildly original novel of a family in flight from the law, set in a near-future American dystopia, a tender-hearted A Clockwork Orange. In an America of the semi-distant future, human knowledge has reverted to a pre-Copernican state. Science and religion are diminished to fairy tales, and Earth once again occupies the lonely center of the universe, the stars and planets mere etchings on the glass globe that encases it. But when an ancient bunker containing a perfectly preserved space vehicle is discovered beneath the ruins of Cape Canaveral, it has the power to turn this retrograde world inside out. Enter the miscreant Van Zandt clan, whose run-ins with the law leave them with a no-win choice: test-pilot the spacecraft together as a family, or be sent separately to prison for life. Their decision leads to some freakish slapstick, one nasty bonfire, and a dissolute trek across the ass-end of an all-too-familiar America. As told to his daughter by Rowan, the Van Zandt son who flees the ashes of his family in search of a new one, the story is a darkly comic road trip that pits the simple hell of solitude against the messy consolations of togetherness. Uniquely tying the dark-comic futures of Kurt Vonnegut to the absurdist, slow-cooked wit of Charles Portis, The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering is an indelible vision of a future in which we might one day live. "--

A Novel

The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering

"The Unknown Knowns"--a reference to a quote from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld--combines social satire with paranoid delusions, in this brilliant send-up of the sometimes tragically comic focus of America's Homeland Security department.

The Unknown Knowns

Bell & Cup

Biography of Sender Jarmulowsky, the East-Side J.P. Morgan, and the origins of the discount steamer trade in historic New York City, eastern European immigration, and the landmark S. Jarmulowsky Bank in Manhattan.

The Establishing Spirits

At the Corner of Canal and Orchard

Jim Rath's wife has grown tired of his hobbies: his immaculately maintained comics collection, his creepy underwater experiments, and his dreams of building a museum based on the Aquatic Ape theory of human evolution. On the night that she leaves him, Jim thinks he has spotted an emissary from a lost aquatic race called the Nautikons. In truth the man is Les Diaz, a low-level agent of the Department of Homeland Security who has been mentally unstable since his wife's drowning. The department has relegated him to an underfunded project, inspecting hotel swimming pools and water slides for terrorist vulnerabilities, a mission Diaz embraces with fervour. When he realises that he's being tailed by Jim Rath, his intelligence instincts are awakened. Agent Diaz feels certain that Jim Rath is a domestic terrorist. The Unknown Knowns is the story of two delusional and quixotic men who stalk one another toward a bloody showdown - a spectacularly moronic act of terrorism at an ageing water park. With its frequent evocations of Donald Rumsfeld's language and posturing, it is also a Swiftian expose of the hypocrisy and incompetence of the Homeland Security apparatus. It is fresh, original and very, very funny.

Jeffrey Rotter

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