Kerry Howley

From the acclaimed author of Thrown, a wild, humane, and hilarious meditation on post-privacy America. A lone young woman stuffs a state secret under her skirt, trusts the wrong people to help, and joins a strange community of fellow travelers. A California teenager sets off on a religious journey, only to find himself trapped in a flooded basement under siege. A nation loses faith in its spies, and finds solace in a fraudulent whistleblower. In this groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction, Kerry Howley builds a map of a parallel universe, drawing in Reality Winner, Lady Gaga, John Walker Lindh, Q, a rescue dog named Outlaw Babyface Nelson, and a mother who will do whatever it takes to get her daughter out of jail. Flooded with information and yet bereft of knowledge, Howley’s subjects face a challenge new to history: they are imprisoned by their past selves, trapped for as long as the Internet endures, allowed to forget neither transient moments in their own lives nor the devastating secrets they’re expected to keep. In following these characters, Howley asks essential questions about modern life that most are unwilling to confront. Who are you? You are data about data. You are a map of connections—a culmination of everything you have ever posted, searched, emailed, liked and followed. A soap opera set in the deep state, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs is a free fall into a world where everything is recorded and nothing sacred, an enthralling investigation into the nature of memory itself.

A Journey Through the Deep State

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs

A woman infiltrates the violent world of mixed martial arts and investigates the lives of two cage fighters.

Thrown

Bottoms up and the Devil Laughs

Thrown is Kerry Howley's knock-out debut and a unique journey into the world of Mixed Martial Arts fighting. In this darkly funny work of literary reportage, narrated by an excitable, semi-fictionalized graduate student named Kit, a bookish young woman insinuates herself into the lives of two cage fighters - one a young prodigy, the other an aging journeyman. Kerry Howley follows these men for three years through the bloody world of mixed martial arts as they starve themselves, break bones, fail their families and form new ones in the quest to rise from remote Midwestern fairgrounds to packed Vegas arenas. With penetrating intelligence and wry humor, Howley exposes the profundities and absurdities of this American subculture. 'The most fascinating book I've read this year. The precision of Howley's prose reminds me of Joan Didion or David Foster Wallace' Time 'A poetic portrait of a bloody American subculture' O, The Oprah Magazine 'The fight book of our generation has landed . . . a fantastic debut' The Week 'Compulsively readable' The New York Times

Fenomenologiestudente Kit dompelt zich drie jaar lang onder in het leven van twee professionele Mixed Martial Arts-vechters: de één een jonge belofte, de ander een journeyman. Op zoek naar de essentiële eigenschappen van de extatische ervaring - als beschreven in het werk van Schopenhauer en Nietzsche -, die ze ondergaat als ze voor het eerst toeschouwer is bij een gevecht, observeert ze de vechters terwijl ze zichzelf uithongeren, botten breken en hun families teleurstellen. Alles om de schamele amateurgevechten te ontstijgen en de achthoekige kooien van Las Vegas' volgepakte arena's te mogen betreden.

Kerry Howley

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