About the book, from the publisher:
Daniel Bloom will either fix our broken world in his imagination or destroy his real life trying.Read an excerpt from Captives and learn more about the book at the publisher's website. Visit Todd Hasak-Lowy's faculty webpage.
A sniper is taking down suits and politicians—in Daniel Bloom’s head.
Bloom is the kind of guy who ends most social gatherings with an alternately raging and despairing conversation about The State of the World. And recently things have taken a turn for the worse. His marriage is on the rocks, his teenage son is becoming increasingly unknowable, and his sense of hopeless impotence has reached a stage of spiritual crisis that's no longer a matter of vapid dinner-party conversation.
So he decamps to his home office to work on his fifteenth screenplay, this time about a federal agent and a nameless assassin. The assassin is a sniper who targets the power elite: corporate chiefs who defraud their employees of billions of dollars in pensions, and political flacks who've rigged the system in their own favor. Only the federal agent isn't sure he wants to capture the sniper.
Soon Bloom realizes that his screenplay hits too close to home: He really does want these people dead, so much so that this revenge fantasy takes over his life, sending him in search of salvation in an outrageous mentor, a possibly dangerous foreign country, and, finally, his very own backyard.
Todd Hasak-Lowy received his Ph.D. in comparative literature from UC Berkeley, where he studied Hebrew, Arabic, and English literature. He is currently an assistant professor at the University of Florida, where he teaches Hebrew language and literature. He is the author of The Task of This Translator, a collection of stories.
The Page 69 Test: Captives.
--Marshal Zeringue
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