Peter: An (A)Historical Romance

By Jeffrey DeShell

Fiction. PETER: AN (A)HISTORICAL ROMANCE, a controversial new novel by one of our most important, innovative, and uncompromising authors re-envisions Herman Melville's Pierre in 1999 Los Angeles. An orphaned child of privilege, Peter enjoys a snug existence full of things--to eat, to wear, and to play with. But his world is rocked when he meets a young Palestinian woman, Reham, who claims to be Peter's half-sister. DeShell's excessive, digressive opera of objects follows these two to Istanbul, Jerusalem, and Gaza City, teetering on the razor's edge between obsession and rejection, fascination and disgust. "A trenchant indictment of everything rampant materialism sought to co-opt in the late 1990s--love, individuality, history, cultural identity"--TimeOut Chicago. "By turns hilariousand harrowing, Peter is pure dynamite"--Laird Hunt.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0970316526
• ISBN13: 9780970316523
• Release Date: June 2006
• Publisher: Starcherone Books
• Length: 400 Pages

Customer Reviews

In A Just World: Oprah's Next Pick

Jeffrey DeShell outdoes Melville at the peak of his social satire with Peter, a novel about a junk character with a junk head, overspilling with the accumulated trash of a junk existence. Peter is the worst of 1990s America and its overstock of globalization-fueled garbage, and his near implosion when confronted with the rest of the world is a profound treat for anyone who's sick of the constant braying about American innocence we've had to endure for the last half-decade. It's the kind of book you'll want to beat a Clintonite to death with, and has the saddest and most horrific final act we've read in years.