The swing voter of Staten Island

In his boldest novel yet, Nersesian has broken through into a new landscape that at once fuses the real with the surreal, the psychological with the psychedelic. Actual characters from the '60s and '70s—Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Daniel Ellsberg, and the Berrigan Brothers—are but a few of the folks who populate this alternate version of American history.The Swing Voter of Staten Island takes place over the course of a week in November 1981. Uli, suffering from amnesia, finds himself on a mission, but isn't quite sure what it is, who sent him, or even who he is . . . Uli soon awakens to the awful fact that this isn't New York City at all. Uli has found himself trapped in New York, Nevada, isolated in the center of an impenetrable desert—where the U.S. government was able to transform one of its "military-situation cities" into a temporary refuge center, designed to resemble New York.