The Audacity

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A bracing satire about the implosion of a Theranos-like company, a collapsing marriage, and a billionaires' "philanthropy summit," for fans of Hari Kunzru and The White Lotus A bracing satire about the implosion of a Theranos-like company, a collapsing marriage, and a billionaires' "philanthropy summit," for fans of Hari Kunzru and The White Lotus. In 72 hours, a blockbuster expose will reveal Victoria Stevens's multibillion-dollar startup as a massive fraud. And Victoria has gone missing. Has she faked her death, leaving her husband, Guy Sarvananthan, to face the fallout- and potential jail time Should Guy flee to his native Sri Lanka, an outcast and a failure Or embrace denial Opting for the latter, he takes the corporate jet to a private Caribbean island, where the 0.0001% have gathered to decide which one of the world's biggest problems to "eradicate forever." Guy drinks and drugs his way into oblivion, through manicured jungles and aboard superyachts, amid captains of industry, legions of staff, and unlikely saboteurs. Meanwhile, Victoria narrates her side of the story from an off-the-grid location in the California desert. In scribbled diary entries shot through with cultish self-help mantras, she plots her comeback, confident she'll prove everyone wrong. Again. Ryan Chapman's incisive novel is a swan dive into the abyss and "Martin Amis's Money for really late, late capitalism" (Amitava Kumar, author of A Time Outside This Time).

Reviews

Praise for The Audacity

A Town & Country Must-Read Book of Spring
The Millions Most Anticipated Books of Spring
Lit Hub's MostAnticipatedBooks of 2024

Chapmans skewering of the rich, the very rich and the ultrarich as they debate the worlds ills is as incisive as it is hilarious.
The Washington Post

Delicious satire.
Vanity Fair

In this funny, observant novel, Ryan Chapman . . . looks closely at the state of wealth and the world today.
Town & Country

If you enjoy your satire blistering, your characters memorable and your prose searing, youve come to the right place.
Inside Hook

[The Audacity] promises to bring back [Chapmans] wildly original sense of humor.
Michael Schaub,Southern California News Group

The Audacity is often wickedly funny . . . Like the contemporary first cousin of a classic American novel, The Great Gatsby.
The Anniston Star

[Chapman]is among the decades sharpest satirists . . . Chapmans love of language shines line by line, working wonders with wordplay in the latest tech speak and Ted Talk argot. Its a parody from the jump, but not without narrative substance and pathos that underlies the immigrant experience, specifically, and more broadly: the struggle to thrive as an artist, let alone survive as a decent, if not content, adult in America.
Style Weekly

The uncanniness of Chapmans meticulously engineered satire allows us to briefly glimpse into the lives of characters most of us might never even bump up against, let alone weekend with on a private island. His depictions show that, just like in real life, all these extravagances are performative . . . The Audacity uses sharp satire and dark humor to heighten the absurdity of these figures and institutions. Readers remain on the outside looking in, but Chapman breaks the spell imposed by the powerful.
BOMB Magazine

Chapman has a sharp eye and a sharper wit . . . [The Audacity]promises some good, hard laughshowever bitter they may beat the expense of the ber-rich.
The Millions

Hilarious . . . Chapmans sharp humor earns him that place among the master satirists.
Lit Hub

Off we go to visit the zoo of the ultra-wealthy and gawk at these neurotic animals in a painstakingly manicured facsimile of their natural habitat . . . Stretches of this book are hilarious, no doubt owing to [Chapmans] strong prose stylist, his observations sharp and well-drawn.
The Rumpus

Fans of The White Lotus will love this.
BookBub

If you like hilarious and action-packed novels about far-from-perfect people, have I got a book for you. Theranos meets The Big Lebowski, with the luxury porn of Crazy Rich Asians sprinkled on top.
The Book Catapult

Merciless satire of the super-rich, especially disruption-obsessed tech moguls . . . The Audacity has a lot in common with HBO's Successionthe rapid-fire chatter, knowing allusions, nihilistic detachment.
Chronogram

A jaunty and acidic satire of the ultrarich.
Arlington Magazine

Dont make the mistake of thinking youre better than these absurd tycoons; the point of the tale is that were all capable of outrageous hubris.
Bethanne Patrick, CultureWag

Fearless, irreverent, and so very funny, The Audacity skewers the ego-driven disruption culture of the uber rich. Chapman is a master of satire, and his hilarious runs are threaded through with moving looks at American identity, grief, self-loathing and self-worth. This is a dark, timely, super smart book.
Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light

There are funny books, and then there is the occasional novel that actually makes you cacklewhich I did, repeatedly, as I read Ryan Chapmans The Audacity. Its a satire that hits on the line level, sparing none of its characters or observation from its skewering wit. Timely in its reference points, but timeless in what it says about the relationship between America, inequality, and cultural assimilation, this book is A Modest Proposal by way of Succession.
Kevin Nguyen, author of New Waves

Ryan Chapmans outstanding comic sensibility is matched by acrobatic prose of the first rank. The Audacity is an immersively entertaining, tightly controlled bullet of a novel.
Teddy Wayne, author of The Great Man Theory and Loner

Equal parts Sam Lipsyte and Don DeLillo, The Audacity is razor-sharp satire about the lowlifes of high tech and the absurdity of our present reality. Chapmans prose overflows with verve, wit, and intelligence, but he never forgets the tender, beating heart at the core. I tore through the book with laughter and envy.
Lincoln Michel, author of The Body Scout

Almost exactly a hundred years later, this is The Great Gatsby, updated. This is the art of the affluent we want. The excesses of the lives of the idealistic or deluded or avaricious super-rich might all be false but what is certainly real is the energy on each page of this novel. The only way to blurb this book is simply quote from it. Martin Amiss Money for really late, late capitalism.
Amitava Kumar, author of A Time Outside This Time

Ryan Chapman cavorts amidst the twisted wreckage of our zeitgeist like its his own rollicking funhouse. The Audacity is a tragicomic thrill ride that tips a trick-filled hat to postmodernists past as it delivers its devastating cultural critique. The smartest, most enjoyable novel Ive read all year.
David Goodwillie, author of Kings County

With The Audacity, Ryan Chapman has perfected the art of satire in a decidedly post-satire era. It is delicate work to mine humor from the daily bathos of Silicon Valley superachievers and their gnomic lusts, but with a surfeit of literary tools at his disposal, Chapman has done it. Employing the sector-specific fluencies of David Foster Wallace, the deadpan whimsy of Douglas Coupland, the intoxicated bite of early Martin Amis, and the postmodern empathy of Jennifer Egan, Chapman has conjured a tragicomic tech dystopia from an Onion headline, a hyper-capitalist wasteland populated by fleece-vested minor gods who havent quite realized theyve already fallen from grace.
Jonny Diamond, editor of Literary Hub

If one can't rein in the ultrarich, one can at least satirize them . . .Chapmans approach befits this can-do crowd, and therein lies the appeal for readers critical of free-market absolutism and its ruthless adherents . . .[A] ferocious takedown.
Shelf Awareness

Chapman proves his staying power as a shrewd and suspenseful satirist in his second novel . . . Chapman conveys malignant excess, arrogance, and greed in scenes of dizzying apocalyptic detail and acid humor.
Booklist

Chapman unspools a droll dramedy loosely based on the spectacular fall of fraudulent healthcare startup Theranos . . . A pithy send-up of one of Silicon Valleys most intriguing crimes.
Publishers Weekly

[Chapman] has a keen eye for the foibles of the new gilded age.
Kirkus Reviews


Praise forRyan Chapman

Chapman's book is one of the funniest American novels to come around in years, a sharp satire of the literary scene as well as the broken prison system. Despite the grim subject matter, Chapman packs more laughs into 128 pages than most sitcoms do in an entire season. Dark, daring, and laugh-out-loud hilarious, Riots I Have Known is one of the smartestand bestnovels of the year.
Michael Schaub, NPR

A compact cluster bomb of satire that kills widely and indiscriminately . . . If youre part of the Venn diagram that subscribes to n+1 and McSweeneys, this is the funniest book youll read all year.
Ron Charles, The Washington Post

[A] gritty, bracing debut . . . Told in searing, high velocity prose.
Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire

I cackled my way through the slim volume, but like I said, I might be strange. If youre the same kind of strange, you might really love this book.
John Warner, The Chicago Tribune

Chapmans satirical jab packs a full-fledged punch.
The Millions

Like a Nabokov novel written by a character who is constantly snorting Ritalin.
Chad Post, Three Percent

[A] funny and excellent debut . . . Supremely mischievous and sublimely written, this is a stellar work.
Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Ryan Chapman creates a narrative voice that is by turns tender, cruel, profane, wildly inventive, and, finally, unforgettable."
Sam Lipsyte, author of Hark and The Ask

"Riots I Have Known is a multivalent title: Ryan Chapmans debut is about a prison riot, unfurls a riot of word-drunk prose, and, most of all, is itself a riot, a virtuoso vocal performance of acidic seriocomedy whose forebears are Thomas Bernhards discursive monologues, Frederick Exleys deadpan wit, and Kafkas Kafkaesqueness, but which is ultimately, as they say, all Chapmans own. Its hard to fi

Author Bio

Ryan Chapman is a Sri Lankan-American writer originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and currently based in Kingston, New York. He is the author of Riots I Have Known, which NPR named "one of the smartest-and best-novels of the year," among other accolades. His criticism and humor pieces have appeared in Bookforum, The New Yorker, The Guardian, McSweeney's, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Frieze, and elsewhere.