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Joshua Corey's avatar

Sounds ambitious and important. The novel I just completed is about Jack Ruby, usually a footnote to Oswald’s story (almost literally in, for example, Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale). In my case a fortuitous coincidence—a distant cousin of mine, a family legend, the boxer Barney Ross, who was lifelong friends with Ruby and testified as a character witness at his trial—planted the seed for a novel about Jewish self-defense and the warped forms it can take. It’s a historical novel set in the 1920s-60s, but it’s inevitably also a response to today’s poisonous atmosphere of lone gunmen, conspiracy theories as path to power, and October 7 and its hideous aftermath. The question of “why” is unanswerable but what interests me is the crack in selfhood (in manhood) through which the violence exits and enters.

The focus on drones is timely. What people can’t accept, I think, is their own vulnerability. The denial of death drives conspiracy theory because we can’t accept that what happened so visibly to the most powerful man in the world will sooner or later, in one form or another, happen to us. It’s when that feeling of denied vulnerability scales up to the level of tribe or nation that it becomes most dangerous, but the lone assassin is himself a symptom of the disease.

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Quiara Vasquez's avatar

This sounds amazing, and I am *extremely* excited for this book -- the conceit of "Glass Century" meant you didn't really get to turn your novelist's eye towards the 2020s, but you are one of the very very few writers I trust to do a novel about modern times that's insightful, rather than a string of too-online signifiers. Can't wait!

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