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Gary Gogurt's avatar

all the contemporary political novels i've read have scenes where the author attends a trump protest and gets mad or watches trump win on election night and gets sad lmao. talk about poverty of the imagination!

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Peter Trachtenberg's avatar

Maybe the opposite of contemporary, but I'd recommend three novels by Ishmael Reed from the 1960s-70s: The Free Lance Pallbearers, Mumbo Jumbo, and Yellowback Radio Brokedown. Each bores into an existing literary genre-- bildungsroman, detective noir, Western-- to explore themes of Black identity and power. The Freelance Pallbearers (1966) seems eerily relevant, with its TV pitchman president who governs and plunders from his toilet seat (he suffers from a "weird, ravaging intestinal illness") while presiding over the mss kidnapping of city children. Mumbo Jumbo introduces the essential vodoun concepts of petro and rada, which might be compared to black and white magic and which have to operate in concert to create a potent and enduring spell.

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