A fierce, searing response to the chaos of the war on terror―an utterly original and blackly comic debut In the early years of the Iraq War, a severely burned boy appears on a remote rock formation in the Akkad Valley. A shadowy, powerful group within the U.S. government Who is he? Where did he come from? And, crucially, what does he know? In pursuit of that information, an interrogator is summoned from his prison cell, and a hideous and forgotten apparatus of torture, which extracts "perfect confessions," is retrieved from the vaults. Over the course of four days, a cavalcade of voices rises up from the Akkad boy, each one striving to tell his or her own story. Some of these voices are Osama bin Laden, L. Paul Bremer, Condoleezza Rice, Mark Zuckerberg. Others are less so. But each one has a role in the world shaped by the war on terror. Each wants to tell This is the world as it exists in our innermost selves. This is what has been and what might be. This is The Infernal .
Author
Mark Doten was born in Minnesota in 1978. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, Guernica, The Believer, and New York magazine. He wrote the libretto for The Source, a work of musical theater about Chelsea Manning and Wikileaks, with music by Ted Hearne, which had its world premiere at BAM's Next Wave Festival in October 2014, and was named one of the best classical vocal pieces of the year by The New York Times. He attended Macalester College and Columbia University and is the recipient of fellowships from Columbia and the MacDowell Colony. The literary fiction editor at Soho Press, he lives in Brooklyn. His first novel, The Infernal, was published by Graywolf Press in February 2015.
