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A Novel
by Ben Fountain
From the award-winning, bestselling author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk comes a biting satire of American politics and a searingly intelligent novel about the cruel absurdities of contemporary life, centering on a world champion professional wrestler with presidential ambitions.
Reporter Clarence Thomas Jr. is looking for a great story, former country music teen star Faith Spack has parlayed her fame into a job at the White House, and the two-term incumbent president is campaigning for a constitutionally dubious third term.
After an outbreak at a campaign rally, a mysterious new pandemic of "weeping sickness" sweeps the nation, threatening the president's hold on the Oval Office. Desperate to retain power, he enlists the mystical pro wrestler Rasputin to help ensure his reelection and guarantee additional seasons of his presidential reality TV show, The Real West Wing.
But as Rasputin's appeal threatens to exceed the president's, and the wrestler's supposedly supernatural powers start to seem like the real thing, the campaign finds itself trapped in a spandex-clad destiny no number of executive orders can control, one in which both Clarence and Faith are compelled to play increasingly large parts.
Hilarious, compelling, and tragically relevant, Rasputin Swims the Potomac is both an escape and a warning, a scathing satire that explores the twists and turns of American democracy as it hurtles toward authoritarianism.
"[Rasputin Swims the Potomac is] a welcome bolt of brilliantly zany fantasia for our grim and dour times.... Fountain's sweet spot is the intersection between reality TV and reality, an intellectual and comedic playground which extends here to the world of wrestling.... Fountain goes on to have about as much fun as you can have with the 26 letters of the alphabet. A comic masterpiece. The current administration is finally getting the book it deserves." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A withering satire...timely and terrifying, Fountain's version of the current and potentially future state of American politics and culture is simultaneously wild and absurd yet eerily plausible." —Booklist (starred review)
"[A] brilliant satire.... More than a laugh riot, this offers an unflinching view at the bottomless depths opened by a president 'whose ego has wormholes Freud never dreamt of.' It's a mordant and chilling portrait of a national hellscape." —Publishers Weekly
"Fiction is truer than real life in Rasputin Swims the Potomac, an audacious, rip-roaring, and terrifying good time. Don't read about this book―it will sound too crazy! Dive in and see for yourself... Ben Fountain is a prophet, comic genius and a master storyteller." ―Maria Semple, bestselling author of Where'd You Go, Bernadette and Go Gentle
This information about Rasputin Swims the Potomac was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Larry D. Moore CC BY-SA 3.0
Ben Fountain's work has received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Los Angeles Book Prize for Fiction, and a Whiting Writers Award, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award and runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He lives in North Carolina.
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