The Mere Future
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
"Clever word craft, poetic political satire and biting humor on every page."—Publishers Weekly
The paperback edition of Sarah Schulman's dystopian satire about urban mores set in New York sometime in the future, when the city has morphed into an idealized version of itself: where rent is cheap, homelessness is nonexistent, and the only job left is marketing. But all is not as it seems, culminating in a murder committed by a prominent New Yorker and a resulting trial that transfixes the city.
Kessler Award-winner Sarah Schulman's other books include Rat Bohemia, The Child, and Ties that Bind.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The author of several New York novels (People in Trouble; etc.), Schulman makes an unfortunate shift with this madcap satire set "in the future, when things are slightly better because there has been a big change." New York has been transformed by the Retrocrat party: franchises have been banned, the minimum and maximum wages are set at $45,000 and $100 million per year, and Staten Island has been declared a part of Texas. In this semiparadise, the unnamed copywriter protagonist has been offered a rare opportunity to have lunch with Harrison Bond, author of the fabulously popular novel My Sperm and the fiction editor of the Brand New York magazine. Bond assigns her a profile of a local artist (word count: eight words) and in the process pitches her into a maelstrom of interlocking relationships, chaotic self-revelations and, eventually, a murder, all of which reveals the dark truth about the new New York. Schulman, however, seems most interested in filling the pages with puns and breathless quirkiness, and while she's got some good ideas, the insistent zaniness of her prose is aggravating at best.
