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Item Description

Description
Autographed copy of The Swing Voter of Staten Island.

Up until now, Arthur Nersesian’s six novels (including The Fuck-Up, MTV/Pocket Books, which has sold over 100,000 copies) have focused on the tragicomedy of fin de siècle New York City. Now, in his boldest novel yet, he has broken through into a new landscape that at once fuses the real with the surreal, the psychological with the psychedelic. Actual characters from the ’60s and ’70s—Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Daniel Ellsberg, and the Berrigan Brothers—are but a few of the folks who populate this alternate version of American history.

The Swing Voter of Staten Island takes place over the course of a week in November 1981. Uli, suffering from amnesia, finds himself on a mission, but isn’t quite sure what it is, who sent him, or even who he is. He ventures across the perilous wilds of New York City, through abandoned neighborhoods and burned-out battlefields. But Uli soon awakens to the awful fact that this isn’t New York City at all. He is a key player in a strange alternate history of both his city and country.

Uli has found himself trapped in New York, Nevada, isolated in the center of an impenetrable desert—where the US government was able to transform one of its “military-situation cities” into a temporary refuge center, designed to resemble New York. While battling to make sense of his surroundings, Uli slowly remembers who he is, and his own culpability in creating the current situation.

What people are saying…
“Nersesian’s extravagantly imagined dystopia relies—as did those in Philip Roth’s Plot Against America and Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union—on an alternate, counterfactual history.”
—New York Times Book Review

“Combining sci-fi space/time-warping, Unabomber-style political ranting and an overall air of goose-bump paranoia, this is one turbo-charged trip . . . A sharp, strange read: Imagine William Burroughs and Philip K. Dick sharing a needle.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“A rousing, intricately detailed romp that eschews laments over a long-gone ‘old New York’ in favor of a speculative paean to Gotham’s unparalleled mutability.”
—Time Out New York

Item Special Note

ARTHUR NERSESIAN is the author of nine novels, including The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx, The Swing Voter of Staten Island, Suicide Casanova, Manhattan Loverboy, East Village Tetrology, the cult-classic The Fuck-Up (more than 100,000 copies sold), dogrun, and Mesopotamia. He lives in New York City.

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