Wow!  While we had never completely given up hope that there would ever be a follw up to Helen DeWitt's brilliant debut, The Last Samurai (NOT to be confused with the Tom Cruise vehicle of the same name that came out years later, to which it bears no relation), we had come pretty close.  So we were nearly bowled over with surprise by our discovery of the impending release of Lightning Rods, which has now just arrived on our shelves.  We imagine that most – and hope all – of our customers who have had the opportunity to read The Last Samurai will share our excitement. 

Helen DeWItt's tour de force, one-of-a-kind novel, The Last Samurai is a Certified Copacetic Classic™ and a great favorite here, to boot, so we've been anticipating this long-rumored book for quite awhile, and now it's here!

It will be awhile longer before it's read here at Copacetic HQ (it runs 608 pages), so we're providing the write-up from its publisher, Dalkey Archive for now:

"A major literary event over two decades in the making, Your Name Here marks the seismic return of Helen DeWitt (The Last Samurai), and will introduce readers to the riveting voice of Ilya Gridneff.

A book of unparalleled scope and vision, Your Name Here is a spectacular honeycomb of books-within-books. In this death-defying feat of ambition, collaborators Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff weave together America’s “War on Terror,” countless years of literary history, authorial sleight of hand, Scientology, dream analysis, multiple languages, emails, images, graphs, into something wondrous and unique.

A metafictional Pygmalion story reminiscent of Charlie Kaufman‘s Oscar-nominated Adaptation, or Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Your Name Here is a rare work of art that captures the process of becoming itself. A reminder that a masterpiece and a doomed voyage look the same at the start."

REVIEWS

"An audacious metafiction... Readers will be left breathless." –Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"DeWitt is a brilliant risk-taker. I truly have no idea what to expect." –The New York Times, "10 Things We're Excited About This Fall"

"An ouroboros–and a big one at that–of a postmodern yarn that threatens to swallow itself at any moment... At once bewildering and beguiling, and a groaning-table feast of words." –Kirkus Reviews

"Although the book may appear, to begin with, to be plotless, it turns out to be tightly organized: a Godard-like enfilade of shaftings, a frontispiece-of-Leviathan-type portrait of the world as a great 'Biz' made up of millions of little bizzes... Your Name Here is a novel that doesn't really believe in novels. The writing is delightfully shameless, disheveled and dissolute; globalized and pornified and digitized somehow, bit after bit after bit." –The London Review of Books

"Peerless." –Lauren Oyler, author of Fake Accounts

"Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff's Your Name Here has been the novel of the century for almost two decades, despite almost no one having read it. Now, at long last, Your Name Here is here. Not a rumor, not an excerpt, not a PDF: this is the real thing–a hilarious, insatiably imaginative meta-meta-meta-novel that takes every risk and plays every card and captures, maybe like no other novel, the internet's jarring dislocations and formal possibilities. Still wildly ahead of its time, Your Name Here contains a multitude of voices so funny, so dark, so alive to every contingency that I wish it were twice as long. What a blast!" –Mark Krotov, coeditor of n+1 and The Intellectual Situation