Alex Foster received his MFA from New York University, where he served as fiction editor of Washington Square Review. His short stories have appeared in Agni, The Common, The Evergreen Review, and elsewhere. Previously, he studied economics at the University of Chicago and conducted research for the U.S. government and for the World Bank’s Gender Innovation Lab in West Africa.
Circular Motion is his first novel.
At Electric Lit Foster tagged "eight pre-apocalyptic books ... set in the run-up to a particular apocalypse that only arrives near the end of the book, if ever." One title on the list:
The Last Policeman by Ben H. WintersRead about another entry on the list.
In six months, an asteroid will wipe out most life on Earth. People are abandoning their jobs, turning religious, experimenting with drugs, hangingthemselves. Trying to keep his head amidst economic and spiritual mayhem, a young detective commits himself to solving a local murder case before the world ends. A more mature author might have smoothed down The Last Policeman into a pat meditation on the value of life, a reconciliation between the tragedy of a single death and the statistics of mass extinction. Winters, however, plays to baser tastes, thank god. Against his existential backdrop, he gives us a bloody (arguably, even, fascistic) cop novel, which doesn’t pretend that life is better understood when backlit by death, but perhaps that mortality intensifies our perspectives on life, misguided as they may be.
The Last Policeman is among David Yoon's ten most captivating apocalypse novels, Tosca Lee's seven top apocalyptic reads, Sam Reader's five books that find beauty in the apocalypse, Joel Cunningham's eleven "literary" novels that include elements of science fiction, and Melissa Albert's five best recent detective fiction classics.
My Book, The Movie: The Last Policeman.
The Page 69 Test: The Last Policeman.
--Marshal Zeringue
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