Bücher von Mark de Silva

American democracy is on its knees. The upcoming election could well be the last and the nation is braced for internal conflict.Meanwhile, on urban patrol, a nightwatchman discovers the latest in a series of prostitutes beaten and left for dead by a mysterious assailant.Meanwhile, his research into his family's past leads him to Sri Lanka under colonialism, with all its echoes of factional divisions and authoritarian rule.Meanwhile, his colleague is implicated in a scheme to reverse-engineer storm dispersal technology and weaponise the weather.Meanwhile, meanwhile, meanwhile: from its basis in a dystopian future and its focus on one man in pursuit of another, Square Wave expands its scope and expands again-into history, musicology, geopolitics-to observe the varieties of decay that emerge from the militarisation of the human mind. The result is a novel that KCRW's Michael Silverblatt calls "e;the most extraordinary debut in fiction that I've encountered in many years... even when I had to suspend comprehension and travel beyond my comfort zone."e;

In this collage of critical reflections, written in the tradition of the short essay running through Francis Bacon and Roland Barthes, the novelist, philosopher, and former New York Times Opinion staffer Mark de Silva looks into matters of both common curiosity and special concern in America today: technological evolution, virtuality, terrorism, the future of the self, the individual's place in a globalized society, the species' place in the natural world, the state of the arts, and the animadversions of the sciences. Above all, Points of Attack is a handbook of the ways of the good life in bad times, and an inoculation against presumption in an era when the axioms of liberal democratic life have come undone and the end of history once again appears a long way off.