I Heart Oklahoma!
Roy Scranton
ISBN: 9781616959388
Published: August 13, 2019
Pricing
Hardcover $25.00
eBook $14.99
More books by Roy Scranton
Description
Suzie’s seen it all, but now she’s looking for something she lost: a sense of the future. So when the chance comes to work with a maverick video artist on his road movie about Donald Trump’s America, she’s pretty sure it’s a bad idea but she signs up anyway, hoping for an outside shot at starting over.
A provocative, genderqu...
Suzie’s seen it all, but now she’s looking for something she lost: a sense of the future. So when the chance comes to work with a maverick video artist on his road movie about Donald Trump’s America, she’s pretty sure it’s a bad idea but she signs up anyway, hoping for an outside shot at starting over.
A provocative, genderqueer, shapeshifting musical romp through the brain-eating nightmare of contemporary America, I Heart Oklahoma! is a book about art, guns, cars, American landscapes, and American history. This kaleidoscopic novel moves from our bleeding-edge present to a furious Faulknerian retelling of the Charlie Starkweather killings in the 1950s, capturing in its fragmented, mesmerizing form the violence at the heart of the American dream.
Media
“[Scranton] writes clearly and convincingly about the emotional, existential challenges that attracted him to war, and how he was changed by the time he returned home.”
—The New York Times, on We're Doomed. Now What?
“Powerful, engaging, heartrending, corrosive and unyielding.”
—Joyce Carol Oates, on War Porn
“Part existential farce, part metatextual dystopian road trip romp, I ❤ Oklahoma! is ambitious, omnivorous, inventive, and imbued with a dark and hilarious sense of whimsy. If your personal journey through the American wasteland has begun to feel like a slog, this book will remind you that there's a certain thrill in watching the show unfold from the first-row seats, the ones in the splash zone.”
—Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
“With whip-smart, multivalent prose akin to Barry Hannah spliced with William S. Burroughs, I ❤ Oklahoma! reads like a hypermodern Heart of Darkness, aimed straight into the malefic gnarl of Trump's MAGA. The result is an epochal, brainbending prism of a road novel, catalyzing any branded icon that might crop up into its wake—from Deleuze to Taylor Swift, Beuys to Bonnie and Clyde, ISIS to TMZ—into an immaculate reflection of a nation mesmerized by its own free fall through oblivion.”
—Blake Butler, author of Three Hundred Million
“Roy Scranton’s fiction has a shattering and deranged vitality. It breaks into your mind and hangs on. I ❤ Oklahoma! reads like a fever dream—cacophonous road-tripping anti-manifesto gives way to lavish degenerate theatre gives way to bloody killing spree. In this eventful novel, the precipitating event is always and ever language—transgressive, rhizomatic, and infinitely mutable.”
—Noy Holland, author of I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like
“There is something dangerous and dizzying about Scranton's writing, a violence of ideas. In I ❤ Oklahoma!, he turns his intellectual weapons on an elusive and necessary subject—the mystery that is America, and the extent to which even those people marinated fully in the mythology of this country can find themselves at a loss to understand it.”
—Omar El Akkad, author of American War
“I ❤ Oklahoma! invents new forms to capture the psychotic break that is present-day America. It’s simultaneously a deconstructed road novel, pop culture avalanche, and historical serial killer story—a book about how the country’s rotted myths have come home to roost. Boasting gleaming intelligence and batshit abandon, this is vital, unsettling, and urgent work.”