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The Terrible
Paperback
Series: American Literature
General FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher Price: $20.95
ISBN13: 9781628976656
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Published: Mar 2 2027
Pages: 125
Language: English
From the celebrated author of Little Lazarus, Michael Bible's The Terrible moves between one man's imagined memories of a past life as Ivan the Terrible's brother, and his more recent recollections as a father careening through modern American society.
The Terrible unfolds in the space between confession and delusion as our narrator, the self-proclaimed brother of Ivan the Terrible, Yuri Vasilievich, is arrested and questioned for an unnamed incident in the parking lot of Twisted Oak Steakhouse in Harmony, North Carolina. Rather than explain what happened, he offers a meandering, occasionally mythic, and often hilarious account of his life. He claims to have been born in 1532 in Russia and is the younger brother of the Russian Tzar. He recounts frozen bear attacks, boyars ripped apart by dogs, a lifelong obsession with dandies and silks, and then pivots to modern day to his assault of a Captain America impersonator in Times Square.
Throughout the novel, the Russian past and the American present blur. Our narrator's mental health deteriorates, or perhaps sharpens. But the emotional truth of his stories--his longing for love, his guilt as a parent, his isolation inside his own mind--cuts through even his most absurd digressions.
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