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Devil Take It

Devil Take It by Daniel Debs Nossiter

$27.99

A satire of the highest order—both acerbic and barbed yet also deeply invested in human decency and common sense.

Satan comes to Washington as Dr. Grippin Fall, a psychiatrist. Under the guise of therapy for a condition he calls mortality, Dr. Fall relates the secret history of humankind from Adam and Eve onward to Eustace Bogges, the editor of the letters page of The Washington Oracle. Meanwhile, Bogges contributes a pseudonymous letter to his own page asserting we’d be a hell of a lot better off if we all simply minded our own business. The inhabitants of Washington adopt this notion, each in their own way, including Donald Trump. As a consequence, history stops for an afternoon in the nation’s capital. Devil Take It is a Faust fable with a very American twist: Bogges, the object of the Devil’s temptation, acquires the offered power, but escapes damnation; or does he? With biting wit and timeless themes, Devil Take It skewers the political and social landscape in a way that is reminiscent of the great masters of satire from Mark Twain to Mikhail Bulgakov and John Kennedy Toole.

Bio:
Son and brother of reporters, Daniel Debs Nossiter started his journalism career at his parents’ dinner table, where he was schooled from an early age in the dialectical arts of asking and answering questions. His first news job, at ABC in Washington, suggested his promise when Barbara Walters found him impertinent. He went on to print journalism, first at The Concord Monitor in New Hampshire, and then as a staff writer at Barron’s in New York. He also freelanced for The Washington Post Sunday Magazine and The New Republic. He now lives, and writes, in Santa Fe New Mexico.

Hardcover
Page count: 200
Trim size: 6 x 9 in.

Print ISBN: 978-1-949846-62-1
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-949846-63-8

SKU: 9798988717393 Categories: ,

Description

Daniel Debs Nossiter
Q: What was your principal inspiration for writing Devil Take It?
A: I was living in Washington, D.C., when I first went to work on the story, considering the city in the way a foreigner, a resident alien might think about it. I’d gotten into the habit of looking with foreign eyes as a boy, a young American, growing up in Paris and New Delhi. The stranger gazing out with varying degrees of comprehension had become a pastime. For example, there was nothing unusual about the number of people who have an inflated sense of their own importance in Washington. But, it seemed to me, that the Parisians hid it better or, at least, carried it off with more style. I began to wonder how Washingtonians might behave if Satan came to visit and took a more direct hand in things. I decided to find out.

Q: How does your experience as a reporter inform the story?
A: A novelist is a reporter interviewing the imagination and at greater length.

Q: How is Devil Take It relevant to our current cultural moment, and how is it timeless?
A: If one decides to explore how people behave, then starting with the ordinary—in this case the exhortation to mind your own business—can lead to extraordinary outcomes. It did not surprise me, well, maybe a little, that the vice presidential candidate for the Democratic Party, twenty years after I first wrote the phrase, called on us to do precisely that.

Q: What are some of the principal literary references and allusions throughout the novel?
A: Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita is a primary influence. But, when I thought about Bulgakov’s two alternating stories—of the Devil in Moscow, and Jesus with Pontius Pilate in ancient Judea—compellingly written as they are, it seemed to me  they stood alone, structurally independent of each other. I wanted to tell the story of the Devil in Washington and the Devil’s account of the secret history of humankind in a way that made them necessary and dependent on each other. Rabelais and Cervantes are crucial, too, the one for the place of lightness of spirit in a satisfactory life and the other in the quixotic battle to find meaning. Finally, the antic and satirical buffoonery of John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces was in the back of my mind.

“Set in Washington during the first Trump presidency, Devil Take It is a satirical retelling of the Faust legend in which a journalist in charge of letters to the editor makes a deal with the devil. It is a novel with endless moving parts, with word play, philosophical and theological conundrums, sharp dialogue, and even a love story (of sorts) thrown in. You will end up knowing a lot more about what you don’t know, while being in thrall to the originality, wit, pace, and depth of the writing.”
— Alfred Alcorn, author of Murder in the Museum of Man

“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

“True style in literature almost has the effect of great cinematography in film. It hypnotizes us. It amplifies everything, even the most mundane details, so that they draw the reader deeper into the story because the reader doesn’t want to miss anything. To me, Devil Take It, has that magic.”
— John Julius Reel, author of My Half Orange: A Story of Love and Language in Seville 

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HERESY PRESS LLC
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Heresy Press is an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing

DR. BERNARD SCHWEIZER | Founder & Director
HERESY PRESS LLC
P.O. Box 425201
Cambridge, MA 02142
USA
info@heresy-press.com

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