A NOVEL FOR OUR TIMES AND A RADICAL PROOF THAT "AMERICA WAS FABLE BEFORE
IT BECAME FACT." In the 1950s, a Puerto Rican Jew with roots in Leipzig
and the Middle East lands in New York Harbor. So begins In the House
Un-American, where Carlos ben Carlos Rossman, wannabe heir to the
American poet William Carlos Williams and distant cousin of Kafka's boy
immigrant sensation Karl Rossman, is forever an absurdist stumble away
from falling into a satirical wormhole. In his wanderings among
Americans and "un-Americans," Carlos leads us through a mirage of genres
and historical lenses--memoirist fictions, essayistic stories, fables,
anti-communist scripts. He comes to the Coney Island boardwalk only to
arrive in his own mind at the shores of the Mediterranean. As he
journeys from the golden age of Spain to the Statue of Liberty among
East Coast Jewish Buddhist pilgrims going West, Carlos reinvents the
rest of us as he remakes himself. In a Mecca of his own making in the
heart of America, Carlos offers a prophetic new vision reconciling Islam
and the American. In the House Un-American maps the continual
transformation of where and who Carlos is and where America might
someday arrive with him.