The much-anticipated new novel from New York City's most celebrated hit downtown writer, Arthur Nersesian, author of the cult-classic The Fuck-Up

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Arthur was the subject of a recent above-the-fold multiple-page cover story in the New York Times City Section; check out the profile here.

Click here for the paperback edition of the book.

Nersesian's cult status (including The Fuck-Up, MTV/Pocket Books, which has sold over 100,000 copies) have focused on the tragicomedy of fin de siecle New York City. Now, in his boldest novel yet, he 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. He ventures across the perilous wilds of New York City--through abandoned neighborhoods and burned-out battlefields. But Uli soon awakens to the awful fact that this isn't New York City at all. He is a key player in a strange alternate history of both his city and country.

Uli has found himself trapped in New York, Nevada, isolated in the center of an impenetrable desert--where the U.S. military was able to transform one of its "military-situation cities" into a temporary refuge center, designed to resemble New York. While battling to make sense of his surroundings, Uli slowly remembers who he is, and his own culpability in creating the current situation.

Arthur Nersesian is the author of six novels, including The Fuck-Up (Akashic, 1997 & MTV Books/Simon & Schuster, 1999), Chinese Takeout (HarperCollins), Manhattan Loverboy (Akashic), Suicide Casanova (Akashic), dogrun (MTV Books/Simon & Schuster), and Unlubricated (HarperCollins). He is also the author of East Village Tetralogy, a collection of four plays. He lives in New York City.