The Berlin Wall

<p><strong>Europe 2020. Some claim that the Berlin Wall once a living entity is coming back together its scattered pieces seeking reunion on the far side of history. The European continent trembles on the edge of total war either in reality or deep in its own feverish imagination. Part present-tense apocalyptic satire and part neo-medieval phantasmagoria David Leo Rice's new novel presents an alternate history of the present where the Internet has become a territory unto itself and unstable factions obsessed with nationalism liberalism and romanticism drive one another toward a clash that could turn the very notions of refuge and culture into the ravings of a lunatic.</strong></p><p><br></p><p><em>With </em>The Berlin Wall<em> David Leo Rice has produced a text that feels totally sui generis: he has achieved the rarest of writerly feats and become his own genre. No other writer I know embodies simultaneity so cleanly or marries the aesthetics of gnosticism decadence and pop-culture with a clarity of prose. If </em>The New House<em> was a bildungsroman from alternative dimensions </em>The Berlin Wall<em> is an allegorical history of the present. It is as if Rice presents an archaeology of time dusting off human chronology to reveal the multiplicative source of life in all its writhing self-contained logic beneath. He charts how forms form and the way the gross larval simplicity of fascism invades and reproduces in bodies.</em></p><p><span style=color: rgba(85 85 85 1)>- Thomas Kendall author of </span><em>The Autodidacts</em> and <em>How I Killed the Universal Man</em></p>