*ONE OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL'S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR*
The mind-bending, brilliant, often hilarious PEN Award-winning classic novel of justice, the law, and the brutal gap between the two.
A Naked Singularity
tells the story of Casi, a child of Colombian immigrants who lives in Brooklyn and works in Manhattan as a public defender—one who, tellingly has never lost a trial. Never. In the book, we watch what happens when his sense of justice and even his sense of self begin to crack—and how his world then slowly devolves. It’s a huge, ambitious novel clearly in the vein of DeLillo, Foster Wallace, Pynchon, and even Melville, and it's told in a distinct, frequently hilarious voice, with a striking human empathy at its center. Its panoramic reach takes readers through crime and courts, immigrant families and urban blight, media savagery and media satire, scatology and boxing, and even a breathless heist worthy of any crime novel. If
Infinite
Jest
stuck a pin in the map of mid-90s culture and drew our trajectory from there,
does the same for the feeling of surfeit, brokenness, and exhaustion that permeates our civic and cultural life today. In the opening sentence of William Gaddis’s
A Frolic of His Own
, a character sneers, "Justice? You get justice in the next world. In this world, you get the law."
reveals the extent of that gap, and lands firmly on the side of those who are forever getting the law.