“The devil is very much in the details of this acute satire of the vagaries of culture and the evolving norms of our times. With a truly Faustian bargain hanging in the balance, Daniel Nossiter's unlikely protagonist leads us through a very funny, ever more existential few days of life, politics, journalism, epistemology and perhaps love in the nation's capitol.” —Robert Hurwitt, longtime theater critic for The San Francisco Chronicle
“Devil Take It reads like Rabelais pulling a Tocqueville on the Trump years — it’s that good, that wild, that incandescently honest. Nossiter is as demented as he is brilliant and has written one of the funniest books I’ve read in years.” — Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“Not since John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces have I had such a good time with a theologically-inflected comic novel. Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita also came to mind. Devil Take It is erudite, cleverly plotted, and funny as Hell.”
—James Morrow, award-winning author of Blameless in Abaddon and Galápagos Regained.
Description
Devil Take It is a sharp, darkly comic satire set against the backdrop of Trump-era Washington, D.C.
In this clever and timely moral fable, Satan arrives on the scene disguised as Dr. Grippin Fall, a psychiatrist with a peculiar diagnosis for Eustace Bogges, the editor of the Washington Oracle’s letters page: mortality. As the Devil guides Bogges through a series of bizarre therapy sessions, he entices him with a doctrine of laughter and mirth inspired by the 16th-century writer François Rabelais. Meanwhile, Bogges, under a pseudonym, pens a letter to his own page suggesting that society would be better off if everyone simply minded their own business. To his surprise, the slogan seizes the imagination of all of Washington’s inhabitants, with even Trump jumping on board—for his own selfish ends. The result is an absurd spiral of civil unrest that momentarily brings history to a halt.
With biting wit and resonant themes, Devil Take It skewers the political and social landscape in a way that is reminiscent of the great masters of satire from Mark Twain to Mihkail Bulgakov and John Kennedy Toole.
