X Out Of Wonderland

X, the novel’s decent and brave protagonist, maintains his optimistic pursuit of love and The Good Life even as a string of catastrophies brutalize him through a series of misadventures that take him around the world. While pointing up the absurdities of our own times, X Out of Wonderland also shows clearly the universal predicament of all humans in all cultures in all times: the need to find meaning and dignity in our lives despite the certainty of death and suffering. The story makes clear that despite our folly, we’ve got a few things going for us: faith, hope, love, and the capacity to endure.

“A biting satire of modern capitalism . . . Cates delivers a caustic but never cynical take on what he sees as the demoralizing fatalism implicit in today’s market-mad ideology.”
— Publishers Weekly

“Cates’s world is futuristic in tone yet based on our very own world today, in a witty, skillful, amusing — and unrelentingly clear-eyed — satire.”
— Kirkus

“Cates packs in quite a story . . . making Wonderland read like a Kafkaesque rendition of George Orwell’s 1984.”
— Willamette Week

“A pitch-perfect satirical novel that’s both fun and wrenching.”
— The Missoulian

“It takes a brave writer to tackle all of it — the complete and crushing madness of our time. It takes an extraordinarily talented writer to succeed. X Out of Wonderland is a smart bomb guided by a laser wit.”
—Richard Manning, author of Against the Grain:
How Agriculture Hijacked Civilization

“If Lewis Carroll covered international trade for the Wall Street Journal, if Lemony Snicket wrote an exposé of the World Trade Organization, if Swift replaced Rukeyser on Wall $treet Week and de Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince replaced Lou Dobbs on Moneyline, the result would not be stranger or more fun to read than David Cates’s send-up of ‘free trade.’ This twenty-first-century fable of international commerce packs the creepily comic truth-telling of the nineteenth-century’s finest satirists.”
— David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K

“X Out of Wonderland is an amazingly cheerful and inventive piece, written with a Mozartian ease, grace, and flourish. Cates writes suppressing a smile on his face, but one will appear on yours as you read this tale.”
— Josip Novakovich, author of April Fool’s Day

“In X Out of Wonderland, God speaks but doesn’t give away any secrets. This is Candide in Kafka-land, David Cates’s stunning modernist take on our culture (the glories of the Global Free Market), along with his intimate regard for folks enduring their condition while loving one another anyway.”
— William Kittredge, author of Who Owns the West?

“David Cates uses lilting, wide-eyed language to describe a pilgrim’s wanderings through a world so terrifying in its priorities that it might even be our own. The result is a darkly beautiful tale, sly and grief-stricken, funny and enraged.”
— Deidre McNamer, author of My Russian