Thermonuclear Mirth: The End of the World, But Not Just Yet

Thermonuclear Mirth: The End of the World, But Not Just Yet

by Gracjan Kraszewski

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Product Code: tnm
Publication date: 2024
Pages: 900
Size: 6.14 x 9.21

$39.95
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About the Author
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A maximalist Catholic comic apocalypse

Thermonuclear Mirth

The End of the World, But Not Just Yet

A novel by Gracjan Kraszewski
America circa 2100 · Dog poetry · ESSNWNAU-AL · Consumerism · Logos · Freedom · Apocalypse

900 pages Maximalist fiction Satire and theology Readers 18+

A novel almost impossible to classify: dystopian, theological, comic, tragic, philosophical, absurdist, picaresque, endnote-driven, linguistically volcanic, and finally ordered toward the question of whether freedom without truth can survive itself.

America after America · après-post-modernity · oranges in a circle · purposeful work · the precipice of time

“The book is at times sincere, at times absurd, at times extremely absurd; it will make you cry, laugh until you cry...”

From the product description

✦ OVERVIEW ✦

America, circa 2100: 53 states, maxed out consumerism and hedonism, and a presidential candidate part Hollywood glamour, part tech wizard who promises to fix all the problems. Allayed against this platform of dystopic-utopianism, if not outright anti-Christ like bread into stones earthly messianism, is the Franklin family, led by patriarch Increase who, in the not too distant past, led a revolt against the government that created the first intra-American nation since the 1860s.

The failed experiment cools, the rebels are pardoned, and normalcy returns. Yet normalcy, in Thermonuclear Mirth, is never exactly normal. Increase’s son Ben becomes the unlikely protagonist of a journey that begins with dog poetry at East Southwestern South Northeastern West North American University of the Arts and Logic, an absurdist think tank in the New Mexican desert founded by the Viennese polymath and Great War veteran Karl Schliemann.

Schliemann founded ESSNWNAU-AL as a societal antidote: a school so absurd, and final-project products more absurd still, that the American consumer might finally be dumbfounded by his own appetite for the vapid and useless. From there Ben graduates into a sprawling odyssey of job seeking, oranges, Idaho, Mississippi, Boise, Europe, friendship, freedom, baseball, theology, footnotes, and the possible end of the world.

After nine hundred pages of a journey equal parts theological, philosophical, comedic, tragic, maximal, and absurd, the book returns to New Mexico, to the Franklin family, to ESSNWNAU-AL, and to the lonely possibility that preventing apocalypse may require a decision no one should ever want to make.

☢ WHAT KIND OF NOVEL IS THIS? ☢

A maximalist novel

The book announces itself as maximal in ambition, size, structure, voice, and comic excess.

A comic apocalypse

Thermonuclear catastrophe hangs over a book full of laughter, friendship, absurdity, and high seriousness.

A Catholic satire

Beneath the comic surface is a critique of sin, consumerism, false freedom, and earthly messianism.

An endnote labyrinth

The endnotes are not ornamental; the author warns that readers must follow them to understand the book.

The novel’s alternate title page gives the game away

Thermonuclear Mirth is also, according to its own wild title-page litany:

On putting ORANGES in a circle; purposeful work · The Unbearable burden of FREEDOM / The PRECIPICE of TIME · A FUTURISTIC INVESTIGATION OF après-POST-MODERNITY’S DISCONTENTED SELF-ABSORPTIONS · and, finally, a book whose very excess becomes part of its meaning.

Inside the novel

53-state America · the Franklin family · ESSNWNAU-AL · dog poetry · Orange Organizers · Hans Mikloff · Thanksgiving politics · the Palouse · Boise · Ostrava · Rome · A.I. apocalypse · a Catholic prelate with a terrifying button

✦ FROM THE BOOK ✦

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If you do, you will not understand the book, you will be hopelessly lost in a wilderness of loose ends and unresolved paradox.

Explanatory Note

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Art is about transcendence displayed. Art is a window into something firm, something more real than reality.

Zero Kelvin = -273.15 Celsius

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Logos is a Person, God Incarnate, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, consubstantial with the Father...

Thanksgiving Day one year after Thanksgiving at Steve and Susie’s

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Only then will it even be possible to speak of rebuilding, of reclaiming.

Schliemann’s letter

☢ KEY WAYPOINTS ☢

0. Thanksgiving Day one year after Thanksgiving at Steve and Susie’s

I. Universitas

II. White Elephant

III. Orange Organizers

IV. Hans Mikloff

V. The Third Lesson

VI. Infected Gator

VII. All about Pat; or, Hans comes home; or, Chernobyl on the Palouse

VIII. Boise

IX. Ostrava

X. Starkville

XI. Odysseus TyVole

XII. What Happened Next

XIII. What Happened After That

✦ BOOK DETAILS ✦

Author

Gracjan Kraszewski

Publication date

2024

Pages

900

Size

6.14 x 9.21

ISBN

978-1-990685-46-0

Reader note

18+ · strong language

The end of the world, but not just yet

A strange, joyful, excessive, profane, theological, and deeply comic novel about the messiness of real life—and the narrow path toward the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.
Gracjan Kraszewski is the author of five books: the novels The Holdout, Thermonuclear Mirth, the novella, Seraphim and the Dust Plague, a book of essays, The Hippo Lectures, and the Civil War history Catholic Confederates. He earned his PhD in history from Mississippi State University and taught at the University of Illinois. He is currently Director of Intellectual Formation at the St. Augustine Center in Moscow, Idaho, while also teaching at the University of Idaho and in Washington State University’s history department and School of Design + Construction. Played baseball in college, professionally in Europe, and for the Polish National Team. Fluent in English, Polish, and French, he possesses intermediate ability in Russian, Italian, and Spanish.