The Making of Zombie Wars
A Novel
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- USD 11.99
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- USD 11.99
Publisher Description
A seriously funny roller-coaster ride of sex, violence, and the absurd trials of an aspiring screenwriter.
Josh Levin, an ESL teacher in Chicago, dreams of making it big as a screenwriter. His laptop overflows with wild ideas like Love Trek, a sci-fi adventure involving alien cabbies, and The Righteous Love, a riotous Holocaust comedy. But it's his zombie script that really comes to life when his unhinged landlord starts rifling through his dirty laundry.
Fleeing to the comfort of his girlfriend Kimmy's arms, Josh soon finds himself entangled with Ana, a Bosnian student with a jealous, violent husband. As Josh's choices spiral from silly to profoundly absurd, The Making of Zombie Wars takes on real consequence in this seriously, seriously funny novel from acclaimed American author Aleksandar Hemon.
A must-read for fans of literary fiction, humor, and contemporary literature, this book is a wild ride through the mind of a writer caught between reality and the zombies in his head.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spinozan philosophy meets screwball comedy in this eccentric, subtly experimental novel by Hemon (The Book of My Lives). Thirtysomething Chicagoan Josh Levin is an ESL teacher and aspiring screenwriter hard at work on a script about a zombie apocalypse. But over the course of a few days, his life takes on twists and turns that far exceed, in sheer weirdness, those of any dystopian screenplay. After Joshua discovers his landlord, a post-traumatic-stressed Desert Storm vet named Stagger, sniffing his American-flag underwear, Josh moves in with his girlfriend, Kimmy, who expresses a wish to take their romance to "a new level." But Joshua's chance to form his first real adult relationship is quickly spoiled when he embarks on an affair with one of his students, an older woman named Ana. When Ana's husband another, possibly more disturbed war vet named Esko exacts revenge by murdering Kimmy's cat, Joshua begins to lose his grasp on the line between fiction and reality. While the novel has some of the improvisational wackiness of a stoner flick, Hemon's more serious concerns are ever present. A story line involving Josh's father's cancer diagnosis forces our hero to consider his own mortality. And Joshua's complicated feelings about narrative parceled out in the form Spinoza quotations and screenplay excerpts give the story the feel of a bold, searching k nstlerroman.
