The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering: A Novel
Apr 2015 · Sold by Metropolitan Books
4.5star
2 reviews
Ebook
224
Pages
family_home
Eligible
info
About this ebook
A darkly comic, wildly original novel of a family in flight from the law, set in a near-future American dystopia.
In an America of the semi-distant future, human knowledge has reverted to a pre-Copernican state. Science and religion are diminished to fairy tales, and Earth once again occupies the lonely center of the universe, the stars and planets mere etchings on the glass globe that encases it. But when an ancient bunker containing a perfectly preserved space vehicle is discovered beneath the ruins of Cape Canaveral, it has the power to turn this retrograde world inside out.
Enter the miscreant Van Zandt clan, whose run-ins with the law leave them with a no-win choice: test-pilot the spacecraft together as a family, or be sent separately to prison for life. Their decision leads to some freakish slapstick, one nasty bonfire, and a dissolute trek across the ass-end of an all-too-familiar America.
As told to his daughter by Rowan, the Van Zandt son who flees the ashes of his family in search of a new one, the story is a darkly comic road trip that pits the simple hell of solitude against the messy consolations of togetherness.
Jeffrey Rotter's The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering is an indelible vision of a future in which we might one day live.
In an America of the semi-distant future, human knowledge has reverted to a pre-Copernican state. Science and religion are diminished to fairy tales, and Earth once again occupies the lonely center of the universe, the stars and planets mere etchings on the glass globe that encases it. But when an ancient bunker containing a perfectly preserved space vehicle is discovered beneath the ruins of Cape Canaveral, it has the power to turn this retrograde world inside out.
Enter the miscreant Van Zandt clan, whose run-ins with the law leave them with a no-win choice: test-pilot the spacecraft together as a family, or be sent separately to prison for life. Their decision leads to some freakish slapstick, one nasty bonfire, and a dissolute trek across the ass-end of an all-too-familiar America.
As told to his daughter by Rowan, the Van Zandt son who flees the ashes of his family in search of a new one, the story is a darkly comic road trip that pits the simple hell of solitude against the messy consolations of togetherness.
Jeffrey Rotter's The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering is an indelible vision of a future in which we might one day live.
Ratings and reviews
4.5
2 reviews
Victor Sanchez
- Flag inappropriate
January 19, 2016
Unique writing style and entertaining story.
About the author
Jeffrey Rotter is the author of The Unknown Knowns, which was a New York Times Editor's Choice. His writing has appeared in The Oxford American, The New York Observer, McSweeney's, and elsewhere. He has assembled modular furnishings at NORAD, dressed up as Clifford the Big Red Dog for Texas school children, and written romance copy for flower-seed packets. He now resides in Brooklyn, New York, where he's edging ever closer to Green-Wood Cemetery and the eternal verdict of the earthworm.
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