The Presidential Papers

(Paperback)

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Description

The Presidential Papers is a calculated mix of old and new.

Its a fix up, science fictions oldest form (short stories combined to make, or seem to make, one narrative), resulting in a book that Kessel alone could have dreamed up and done. He often writes about US presidents. Why not stack them in order, by era and importance and culpability The narrative they shape together is for the reader to discover.

Our usual Outspoken Interview.

Reviews

"Kessel's writing, which recalls the best of such cutting-edge authors as Norman Spinrad and Philip K. Dick, while retaining its own acidic elegance of style, is nothing less than brilliant."
--Austin American-Statesman

"...Kessel successfully walks the fine line between mordant farce and psychological realism... Real people moving through an American reality that gets more and more surreal..."
--Norman Spinrad, Asimov's Science Fiction

"Kessel is our American Brian Aldiss, capable of the most artful and rigorous literary composition, but with a mischievious genius that inclines him toward speculative fiction... he writes with subtlety and great wit... and his craftmanship is frequently absolutely brilliant. Plus, his sense of comedy is remarkable."
--Publisher's Weekly

"...Kessel's influences seem to come equally from history, literature, and Hollywood... [but] enjoyable and skillful as Kessel's history-and-Hollywood numbers may be, these other stories remind us of his versatility and depth, and his acute understanding of the way SF works."
--Locus

"Kessel's wit sparkles...."
--Entertainment Weekly

"Kessel's blend of dark humor and reality-stretching scenarios is consistently mesmerizing."
--Booklist

"John Kessel is one of American SF's finest writers..."
--Nick Gevers, Locus

"John Kessel's writing exists at the edge of things, in the dark corner where the fiction section abuts the science-fiction shelves, in the hyphen where magic meets realism. Reading Kessel's wonderful fabulations is like staying out too late partying and seeing strange angels while stumbling home in the dawn's first light."
--Rich Rennicks

"...despite his clear affection for classical SF, in Kessel's hands its materials and machineries get pushed around, turned around, interrogated, ironized, mashed up with modernist takes, and generally transformed into shapes that serve Kesselian agendas, aesthetic, political, and personal..."
--Russell Letson, Locus Magazine

Author Bio

John Kessel is the author of the novels Pride and Prometheus, The Moon and the Other, Good News from Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice, and in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly, Freedom Beach. Kessel's stories have twice received the Nebula Award given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, in addition to the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, the Locus Poll, the James Tiptree Jr. Award. Kessel holds a B.A. in Physics and English and a Ph.D. in American Literature. He helped found and served as the first director of the MFA program in creative writing at North Carolina State University, where he has taught since 1982. He lives and works in Raleigh, NC with his wife, the author Therese Anne Fowler.