The Wall of America

Surreal and satiric, this collection of short fiction pays a mesmerizing visit to the shadowy zone that lies between present everyday life and a perilous near future that is frighteningly tangible. In "The Wall of America," the Department of Homeland Security has put up a border wall between the U.S. and Canada, but the NEA has plans to turn it into the world's largest art gallery. After the Rapture, working-class life for "A Family of the Post-Apocalypse" is not as different as one might imagine, despite the occasional plague of biker-gang locusts. Between addiction and art is "Ringtime," where a criminal is trapped in a recursive compulsion to visit other people's memories while he is forced to record his own for an eager audience. A Somali schoolgirl living in post-WWIII Minneapolis goes on a bloody crusade to rid her town of a familiar predator, one who might just be a monster, in "White Man." Vivid, starkly imagined, and strikingly articulate, this disquieting compilation is a journey that skillfully straddles the line between absurdity and irony.

Thomas M. Disch is a poet and book critic whose essays have been published in Entertainment Weekly, Harper's, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. He is the author of The Brave Little Toaster, Camp Concentration, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, The Prisoner, and The Word of God. He lives in New York City.