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Crooked Audiobook
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Publisher Description
Award-winning novelist Austin Grossman reimagines the Cold War as an epic battle against the occult waged by the ultimate American antihero: Richard Nixon.
Richard Milhous Nixon lived one of the most improbable lives of the twentieth century. Our thirty-seventh president's political career spanned the button-down fifties, the Mad Men sixties, and the turbulent seventies. He faced down the Russians, the Chinese, and ultimately his own government. The man went from political mastermind to a national joke, sobbing in the Oval Office, leaving us with one burning question: how could he have lost it all?
Here for the first time is the tale told in his own words: the terrifying supernatural secret he stumbled upon as a young man, the truth behind the Cold War, and the truth behind the Watergate cover-up. What if our nation's worst president was actually a pivotal figure caught in a desperate struggle between ordinary life and horrors from another reality? What if the man we call our worst president was, in truth, our greatest?
In Crooked, Nixon finally reveals the secret history of modern American politics as only Austin Grossman could reimagine it. Combining Lovecraftian suspense, international intrigue, Russian honey traps, and a presidential marriage whose secrets and battles of attrition were their own heroic saga, Grossman's novel is a masterwork of alternative history, equal parts mesmerizing character study and nail-biting Faustian thriller.
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“In telling the secret story of Richard Nixon, Austin Grossman draws back the curtain on American history. Senator Joe McCarthy should have been much, much more frightened. Once I started reading Crooked, I couldn’t put it down. But be warned, even as you devour this book, it will devour you.”
— Daniel O’Malley, author of The Rook
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“A captivating parallel tale.”
— Entertainment Weekly -
“A cantering hodgepodge of American history, black magic and political satire…Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Washington-style.”
— Washington Post -
“A nuanced, funny, and moving characterization of a man reviled during (and after) his term of office. A droll riff on twentieth century politics…Those who love deconstructing the supernatural literary references…will find much to savor in Crooked.”
— Los Angeles Times -
“Ingenious…This novel works as gleeful satire, as wacky alternate history, and as thriller, but what really shines is the character study at its center…Grossman succeeds in making his fantastic explanation seem more believable than the truth.”
— Library Journal (starred review) -
“Imagine a world in which Richard Nixon wasn’t a paranoid and conniving president but a selfless hero battling a supernatural enemy. Grossman does just that in this wildly improbable but entertaining novel.”
— BookPage -
“The political autobiography turns into a Cold War spy caper and then into a series of supernatural adventures bordering on Lovecraftian horror…Grossman has done a fine job of combining history, thriller, and weird tale.”
— Publishers Weekly -
“A worthy pop-cult amusement, if sometimes reading like cutting-room-floor Stephen King mixed up with a little Boris and Natasha.”
— Kirkus Reviews
Awards
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A BookPage Top Pick for August 2015 in Alternate History
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About Austin Grossman
Austin Grossman is a video game design consultant and the author of Soon I Will Be Invincible, which was nominated for the 2007 John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize. His writing has appeared in Granta, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. He lives in Berkeley, California.
About Kiff VandenHeuvel
Kiff VandenHeuvel, voice talent and audiobook narrator, is originally from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and is an alumni of the Second City comedy theater. He is an accomplished improviser and sketch comedy director, and he teaches voice-over, improv, and directing at Second City Hollywood. He has appeared in hundreds of television and radio commercials and is well known in the video game community as the voice of Zachary Hale Comstock in Bioshock: Infinite.