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From the widely acclaimed author of White Tears, a bold new novel about searching for order in a world that frames madness as truth.
After receiving a prestigious writing fellowship in Germany, the narrator of Red Pill arrives in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee and struggles to accomplish anything at all. Instead of working on the book he has proposed to write, he takes long walks and binge-watches Blue Lives--a violent cop show that becomes weirdly compelling in its bleak, Darwinian view of life--and soon begins to wonder if his writing has any value at all.
Wannsee is a place full of ghosts: Across the lake, the narrator can see the villa where the Nazis planned the Final Solution, and in his walks he passes the grave of the Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist, who killed himself after deciding that "no happiness was possible here on earth." When some friends drag him to a party where he meets Anton, the creator of Blue Lives, the narrator begins to believe that the two of them are involved in a cosmic battle, and that Anton is "red-pilling" his viewers--turning them toward an ugly, alt-rightish worldview--ultimately forcing the narrator to wonder if he is losing his mind.
[A]s an allegory about how well-meaning liberals have been blindsided by pseudo-intellectual bigots with substantial platforms, it's bleak but compelling...This novel, in all its disorder, represents some worthy and spirited push back. 'Kafkaesque' is an overused term, but it's an apt one for this dark tale of fear and injustice." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Dazzling...Kunzru has created a complex, challenging, and bold story about a world gone amok." - Booklist (starred review)
This information about Red Pill 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.
Hari Kunzru is the author of seven novels, Red Pill, White Tears, Gods Without Men, My Revolutions, Transmission, The Impressionist and Blue Ruin. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and writes the "Easy Chair" column for Harper's Magazine. He is an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has been a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at New York University and is the host of the podcast Into the Zone, from Pushkin Industries. He lives in Brooklyn.
Author Interview
Link to Hari Kunzru's Website
Name Pronunciation
Hari Kunzru: HAR-ee KUNE-zroo
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