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Tin House Books
September 2016
On Sale: September 13, 2016
368 pages ISBN: 1941040411 EAN: 9781941040416 Hardcover
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Mystery Psychological
For fans of Joshua Cohen and Ben Lerner, After James
captures the dystopian strangeness of our current world. A neuroscientist walks out of her life and isolates
herself in the woods, intending to blow the whistle on a
pharmaceutical company and its creativity drug gone
wrong. A recently orphaned graduate school dropout is
hired as a “literary detective” to decode the work of a
mysterious Internet poet who writes about disappearances
and murders with an inexplicably precise knowledge of
private details. And a virologist discovers her identity
has been stolen by a conceptual artist in whose stories
someone always goes missing. Ali, James, and Celia exist
in worlds where implausibilities that once belonged to
science fiction, ancient superstition, or dystopian
visions are real or impending. Set in great cities, remote regions, and deadly
borderlands, Michael Helm’s groundbreaking novel, After
James, is told in three parts, each gesturing toward a
type of genre fiction: the gothic horror, the detective
novel, and the apocalyptic. Science and art become
characters, and secrets form, hidden in the codes of
genetic sequences, poems, and the patterns of political
violence. Part to part, elements repeat―otherworldly
weather, disturbing artwork, buried corpses―and amid
these echoes, a larger mystery arises, one that joins
artifice to nature, and fiction to reality, delivering us
into the troubling wonder of the present world.
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