Devil Take It

Set in Trump’s Washington, Devil Take It is an ironic moral fable and an uproarious newspaper and political satire anchored in the current moment, yet timeless in its diction and humanity.

Satan visits Washington as Dr. Grippin Fall, a psychiatrist. He diagnoses Eustace Bogges, editor of the letters page of the Washington Oracle, with a condition he calls mortality. Over the course of his therapy, Bogges learns the infernal view of humankind’s history from Adam and Eve to the present, as the Devil tempts him with an irreverent gospel of laughter, whose messiah is the 16th-century French writer François Rabelais.

Meanwhile, Bogges mischievously contributes a pseudonymous letter to his own page suggesting that we’d be a hell of a lot better off if everybody would simply mind their own business. To Bogges’s astonishment and dismay, the slogan seizes the imagination of all of Washington’s inhabitants. Trump, too, embraces the notion but for his own political and financial gain, unleashing a final spasm of civil anarchy that brings history to a halt.

Written in the grand satirical tradition of Mark Twain, Mikhail Bulgakov, and John Kennedy Toole, this is a devilishly funny tale filled with absurd twists and surprising revelations.

About the Author

Daniel Debs Nossiter, son and brother of reporters, became one himself. After a stint at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire, he joined the staff of Barron’s in New York, then free-lanced in Washington for the New Republic and the Washington Post Sunday Magazine. He now lives and writes in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Praise for Devil Take It

“The devil is very much in the details of this acute satire of the vagaries of culture and the evolving norms of our times. With a truly Faustian bargain hanging in the balance, Daniel Nossiter’s unlikely protagonist leads us through a very funny, ever more existential few days of life, politics, journalism, epistemology and perhaps love in the nation’s capitol.” —Robert Hurwitt, longtime theater critic for The San Francisco Chronicle

“Devil Take It reads like Rabelais pulling a Tocqueville on the Trump years — it’s that good, that wild, that incandescently honest. Nossiter is as demented as he is brilliant and has written one of the funniest books I’ve read in years.” — Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize winning author of  The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Not since John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces have I had such a good time with a theologically-inflected comic novel. Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita also came to mind. Devil Take It is erudite, cleverly plotted, and funny as Hell.” —James Morrow, award-winning author of Blameless in Abaddon and Galápagos Regained.

To request a review copy or to arrange an interview with the author, please contact:
Rachel Marble / 978-870-7974 / rmarble@skyhorsepublishing.com

Devil Take It
By Daniel Debs Nossiter
Heresy Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing
Hardcover also available in E-Book
On Sale: November 12, 2024
$27.99
ISBN: 9781949846621 https://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/9781949846621/devil-take-it/