Comically absurd and painfully real, DELIVER US is a prescient and provocative literary novel that moves swiftly through near-future Detroit as a black social-media activist leads a campaign against Amazon, whose new fleet of delivery drones offers rebirth to the blighted city while threatening to magnify existing racial inequalities.
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"Deliver Us is a wild, funny, ridiculous and yet deeply serious novel that imagines a near future in which class, commerce, race, technology, and our ever evolving social politics intersect, and explode. Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite are always inventive, always captivating, and always deeply attuned to the strangeness and the beauty of our often dysfunctional culture." — Phil Klay, National Book Award Winner, author of Redeployment Praise for War of the Encyclopaedists: "Spirited...a captivating coming-of-age novel that is, by turns, funny and sad and elegiac." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times |
When retiree Luther Prince shoots down an Amazon delivery drone flying over his modest home in eastside Detroit, he gets slapped with criminal charges, and his granddaughter Piper takes to social media to campaign against the Seattlebased tech-giant, whose deal with the city and the FAA has given them two months to demonstrate the safety of their new drone delivery program. But are they saviors bringing jobs to the blighted city, or imperialists out for their own gain at the expense of Detroit’s mostly black population?
That's the question DELIVER US swirls around in an absurd and highstakes marketing battle for the soul of Detroit. One one side, Piper Prince and her guerrilla army composed of an aging graffiti legend, an androgynous local rapper, a white urban farmer, a hipster stand-up comic, and a teenage hacker. On the other, Amazon, Jeff Bezos, and his Detroit team, led by rising star Annika Dahl, Amazon's head of PR for Detroit, and Jamal Dent, a native Detroiter and former Air Force drone pilot returning to his home city at the head of Prime Air.
And in this midst of this chaos, several awkward romances! Black and white, hipster and hood, Seattle and Detroit. Love blooms between arson, robbery, Krav Maga, and hip-hop. It struggles to thrive under a sky filled with ever-growing thickets of drones—drones with packages, drones with pizzas, drones with googly eyes delivering watermelons to church barbecues. With a wild style and a serious soul, this charming and challenging novel disentangles our historical inequalities and explores the pitfalls and opportunities of the future.
That's the question DELIVER US swirls around in an absurd and highstakes marketing battle for the soul of Detroit. One one side, Piper Prince and her guerrilla army composed of an aging graffiti legend, an androgynous local rapper, a white urban farmer, a hipster stand-up comic, and a teenage hacker. On the other, Amazon, Jeff Bezos, and his Detroit team, led by rising star Annika Dahl, Amazon's head of PR for Detroit, and Jamal Dent, a native Detroiter and former Air Force drone pilot returning to his home city at the head of Prime Air.
And in this midst of this chaos, several awkward romances! Black and white, hipster and hood, Seattle and Detroit. Love blooms between arson, robbery, Krav Maga, and hip-hop. It struggles to thrive under a sky filled with ever-growing thickets of drones—drones with packages, drones with pizzas, drones with googly eyes delivering watermelons to church barbecues. With a wild style and a serious soul, this charming and challenging novel disentangles our historical inequalities and explores the pitfalls and opportunities of the future.
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Christopher Robinson is a Boston University and Hunter College MFA graduate, a MacDowell Colony fellow, and a Yale Younger Poets Prize finalist. His writing has appeared in many publications, including The Kenyon Review and McSweeney’s.
Gavin Kovite was an infantry platoon leader in Baghdad from 2004-2005. He attended NYU Law and is now an Army lawyer. His writing has appeared in literary magazines and in Fire and Forget, an anthology of war fiction. Together, Robinson & Kovite have authored two novels War of the Encylopaedists (Scribner, 2015), and Deliver Us (Alephactory, 2018). Check out their joint website: www.RobinsonKovite.com |