The Great Anti-American Novel

by Daniel Donatelli

Overview

The Great Anti-American Novel is a memoir written by a confessed mass-murderer in an offshore federal detention facility. The narrator's penetratingly satirical story centers on his small family coming together and being ripped apart by a global economic and cultural collapse that triggers a second American civil war, setting up the events that ultimately result in Dante Thompson and his adopted sister Sylvia orchestrating and carrying out an explosive, blood-gushingly violent retribution for the tragic and untimely deaths of their heroic father and former nation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781937648152
Publisher:	H.H.B. Publishing, LLC
Publication date:	11/05/2013
Pages:	434
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.97(d)

About the Author

Daniel Donatelli was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1981. He was an all-state baseball player in 2000, and he wrote the first draft of his first novel on winter break during his freshman year at Ohio University, where he made the baseball team and quit on the same day, having decided to defenestrate himself through the window of youthful athleticism and into the long fatal plummet of deep literature. He graduated from OU in 2004, moved to Los Angeles, made a bunch of money doing corporate QA garbage, and in 2010 he moved back to Ohio and co-founded H.H.B. Publishing, LLC, and released his first two novels. Mr. Donatelli is an unabashed bibliophile, and he currently lives in his thoughts.

Editorial Reviews

★ 12/16/2013
Donatelli presents Dennis Robert Justin, a surly hermit who enjoys nothing so much as books and solitude. His bizarre death spurs Big Boy (who narrates this novel, set in the not-too-distant future, from a jail cell) and Candy—children Justin rescued from an abusive Catholic orphanage—to revenge, and to attack a decayed America led by hedonistic baby boomers to self-destructive conflict. The moral choice presented here is as old as Sophocles, and Donatelli's Latin headings deliberately evoke a sense of parallel between the collapse of ancient Rome and America today. Big Boy's destructive, murderous quest and self-justifying logic undoubtedly parodies the consciousness of Vietnam-era radical groups such as the Weathermen, but the struggle between self-righteous isolation and the need for community resonates throughout. Donatelli somehow melds an action-packed view of a dystopian future with reflections on the dilemma of a decaying modern-day America.

Publishers Weekly