Kobek - Only Americans Burn in Hell

In this ingenious mess of a novel, with all the bullshit paranormal characters that a superhero-habituated modern audience requires, Jarett Kobek clearly and calmly explains our genocidally idiotic mess of a culture as it plunges enthusiastically into a genuine, non-fictional damnation that Batman isnt going to rescue it from. Brilliantly funny and sociologically terrifying, Only Americans Burn in Hell is the best satire of our contemporary nightmare that you will ever see, and very possibly the last. Read it while youre still neurologically capable. Alan Moore

This time Kobek has called all of his own craziest bluffs and rocketed straight over the ionosphere, into sheer blue sky and beyondthis book breathes in outer space. One wishes the phrase takes no prisoners had been saved for when wed need it. If you dont find yourself busting a gut laughing, then youre probably still in denial of how deeply you feel implicated. Jonathan Lethem

Jarett Kobeks books are an attempt to explode what the novel could still be, as radical as Samuel Richardson or Laurence Sternes attempts to define what it was in the first place. Only Americans Burn in Hell is a fantasy work about mythic Amazons time-travelling to modern America of the type currently clogging multiplexesbut one infected by anxieties about sexual politics, the ethics of the digital world and the horrorshow of the Trump administration. Kobek makes you laugh and think at the same time, engaging both the head and the gut. Stewart Lee

Only Americans Burn in Hell is a smoking hot and hilarious dissection of why the world is in such a mess right now. While you watch Jarett Kobek pour gasoline on everythinginternational politics, Internet culture, the book business, American presidents, Christianity, capitalism, the fantasy genreyou will be so mesmerised and laugh so much that your faith in humanity will be restored by the time he lights the match. Jarett Kobek is one of our most groundbreaking writers. Dorthe Nors

Theres a chance that when the dust settles on the cultural and political insanity of the early twenty-first century, only one writer will remain relevant: Jarett Kobek. With scathing wit, shocking insight and brutal honesty Kobek demolishes social media and the publishing industry, introduces us to a Saudi Prince hopped up on DMT, and conjures perhaps the most important and hilarious fairy story ever written. Ivy Pochoda

To think of Jarett Kobek as merely (merely!) an American Houellebecq would be sorely to miss the point. His energy, intellect, wit, sensibility, erudition, tenderness, andyesobnoxiousness add up to something wholly original, and absolutely necessary. Only Americans Burn in Hell extends the vibrant, reckless critiques offered by I Hate the Internet into our present moment, and perhaps a little bit beyond: one reads it with a sense of elation, gratitude and relief that someone is saying these things out loud. So far as that goes, Kobek may be the only contemporary American novelist who matters. Matthew Specktor

ALSO BY JARETT KOBEK

ATTA

I Hate the Internet

The Future Wont Be Long

Do Every Thing Wrong! XXXTentacion Against the World

JARETT KOBEK

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Serpents Tail, an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

3 Holford Yard

Bevin Way

London

WC1X 9HD

www.serpentstail.com

Copyright 2019 by Jarett Kobek

Cover Design: Peter Dyer

Cover Photograph: iStock

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.

ISBN 9781788162203
eISBN 9781782835349

The last time anyone thanked me for my honesty was in an email sent by the Office of Development and Alumni Relations at New York University, an institution of higher learning centered in New York Citys Greenwich Village.

NYU has three distinguishing characteristics.

The first is that its my alma mater.

I graduated in 2002 AD, after giving the university an absurd amount of money for an undergraduate degree.

This is why the school begs me for money.

Its like a junkie who cant stop.

NYUs second distinction is its inhuman cost.

In 2017 AD, the tuition was $46,170 for a year. Throw in campus housing and administrative fees, and the total was $63,472.

To put this in context: as of 2016 AD, the American median income was $57,617 per person.

You cant charge $63,472 and expect much more than a mixture of the rich and the gullible.

The gullible emerge from NYU in a state of financial ruin, indebted for a substandard education that they couldve received for about 1/8th of the price at a state-run university.

Welcome to adulthood!

Time to pay back $253,888!

With compounding interest!

The rich kids come out fine.

The rich kids are always fine.

The third thing that distinguishes NYU is its Abu Dhabi campus, which opened in 2014 AD.

The idea behind the Abu Dhabi campus was to construct a mirror-world NYU that bestowed the same substandard education, and thus conferred the same substandard degree, as the Greenwich Village campus.

The only difference was that the mirror-world campus would be located on Happiness Island in the United Arab Emirates, an absolute monarchy funded by the worlds seventh-largest oil reserve.

Nothing says academic freedom like petrol feudalism!

Before the Happiness Island campus had its grand opening, an article appeared in the New York Times which detailed the nature of NYUs new venture.

The schools administration had arranged a deal with the government of the United Arab Emirates, in which the oil monarchy would cover the whole expense, and construction, of the mirror-world campus.

Picture this: a repressive regime renowned for its human rights abuses makes a deal with a bunch of very nave and very greedy American bureaucrats.

What could possibly go wrong?

The oil monarchy sent labor recruiters around the Indian subcontinent.

The recruiters told people that they could make big money if they came to Abu Dhabi and helped build the mirror-world campus on Happiness Island.

When people of the Indian subcontinent arrived in Abu Dhabi, happiness proved elusive.

The workers were stuck in subhuman housing and paid dirt-poor wages.

When they tried to strike for the money they were promised, they had the shit beat out of them by the police.

And the workers couldnt leave Happiness Island.

Their passports had been confiscated.

They were slaves.

And although putting people into human bondage and making them build college campuses was a time-honored tradition, itd been a very long while since any American institution of higher learning had involved itself in this sort of disgrace.

On August 30th, 2017 AD, I received an email from NYUs Office of Development and Alumni Relations.