Following his failure to break into the Hadron Collider and merge with the so-called "God particle," The Writer from The Invented Part can no longer write or sleep. Instead, he lies awake, imagining and reimagining key moments of his life, spinning out a series of insomniac visions every bit as thought-provoking as they are dreamlike. A mysterious foundation dedicated to preserving dreams, suddenly invaluable in the wake of the dream-eradicating White Plague; a psycho-lyrical-photophobic terrorist; an electric and mercurial lullaby; three lunatic sisters (and an eclipsed brother) who write from the darkest side of the most wuthering lunar heights; a hallucinating prisoner and a hallucinatory family; a genius addicted to butterflies and an FBI agent addicted to that genius; a looney and lysergic uncle and parents who model but are not model parents; a revolutionary staging of Shakespeare for the children of chic guerrillas; a city of sleepless bookshops; and a writer who might be 100 years old. Or not.
With characteristic wit, careening style, and array of cultural references, high and low and everything in between--from Shakespeare, the Bront sisters, and Vladimir Nabokov to Talking Heads, superhero movies, and Rick and Morty--the second volume of Fresn's trilogy is one of the most ambitious, unique, and entertaining novels of our time.