FKA USA: A Novel

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Description

FKA USA is a wildly imaginative, funny, oddly prescient, and brilliantly futuristic dystopian tale with eerie contemporary relevance about a young man in 2085 who realizes the world he lives in might be its very own Emerald City. Reed King's amazingly audacious novel imagines a final, disastrous president of the United States, whose self-interested rule provoked the splintering of the states into individual countries. The novel follows Truckee Wallace, a young man plucked from obscurity from the factory line where he works, hand-picked by the president to lead a covert mission: to bring a talking goat to the other side of the continent and hopefully save civilization. Along the way, he picks up an android who wants to be human and a well-intentioned former convict who has had a lobotomy. As this strange foursome encounters an environmentally depleted and lawless continent, the parallels to our own times become devastatingly-and hilariously-clear. Filled with footnotes that could be an incredible novel in their own right, FKA USA is insanely smart and brimming with social satire. A futuristic novel that is a mirror to our contemporary world, FKA USA deserves to be shelved alongside such classics as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Reviews

"A sort of 'Mad Max' reimagining of The Wizard of Oz, complete with its own version of the Yellow Brick Road....King, the novel's pseudonymous author, takes infectious joy in his imagined world; its impressive layers are the best reason to read the book. FKA USA has a lot to offer."
--USA Today

"I liked FKA USA so much. I mean, there were a lot of reasons. It is, in many ways, the sort of book I'm always looking for...a visionary head-trip of apocalyptic political satire...absolutely, mind-blowingly, ridiculously crazy."
--NPR.org

"[An] absurdist depiction of the US on the verge of collapse, complete with talking goats and narcissistic billionaire presidents--okay, maybe it isn't that absurd."
--Entertainment Weekly

"Cunning...Outrageous...Apocalyptic fiction with a hearty serving of weird."
--Booklist, starred review

"Eminently readable...fantastic characters...An epically concocted apocalyptic vision of America in all its faded glory."
--Kirkus Reviews

"[An] epic and wild story."
--Cinemablend

"FKA USA is a satirical, Wizard of Oz road trip through a post-apocalyptic fairground, and well worth joining for the ride."
--Toronto Star

Author Bio

Reed King is the pseudonym of a New York Times bestselling author and TV writer.