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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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Ross Barkan's avatar

I'd love to read this!

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Ken Kovar's avatar

Jack Ruby was one of those characters that made the Kennedy killing a conspiracy theorists playground. If Oswald had testified the case would never had been such a mystery . Please go for it this is a great premise!

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Joshua Corey's avatar

The novel is done, gents! I just need a publisher.

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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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Contarini's avatar

Looking forward to this from you! I’m currently at the point in my novel where a violent conflict is about to occur where drones in the hands of one side are the decisive factor. Drones are on everyone’s mind because they are the machine guns of the 21st-century, the new technology that is going to transform all the previous thinking and planning of the past.

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Katya Grishakova's avatar

Sounds interesting.

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Jason S.'s avatar

Just what we need. Another pretext and catalyst for stealing away more of our remaining freedoms and privacy.

But perhaps I overestimate what we retain even now.

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