Author Talk: Ben Fountain — Rasputin Swims the Potomac: A Novel - with Stephen Kearse

Watch author Ben Fountain discuss "Rasputin Swims the Potomac" at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

From the award-winning, bestselling author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk comes a biting satire of American politics and a searingly intelligent novel about the cruel absurdities of contemporary life, centering on a world champion professional wrestler with presidential ambitions

Reporter Clarence Thomas Jr. is looking for a great story, former country music teen star Faith Spack has parlayed her fame into a job at the White House, and the two-term incumbent president is campaigning for a constitutionally dubious third term.

After an outbreak at a campaign rally, a mysterious new pandemic of “weeping sickness” sweeps the nation, threatening the president’s hold on the Oval Office. Desperate to retain power, he enlists the mystical pro wrestler Rasputin to help ensure his reelection and guarantee additional seasons of his presidential reality TV show, The Real West Wing.

But as Rasputin’s appeal threatens to exceed the president’s, and the wrestler’s supposedly supernatural powers start to seem like the real thing, the campaign finds itself trapped in a spandex-clad destiny no number of executive orders can control, one in which both Clarence and Faith are compelled to play increasingly large parts.

Hilarious, compelling, and tragically relevant, Rasputin Swims the Potomac is both an escape and a warning, a scathing satire that explores the twists and turns of American democracy as it hurtles toward authoritarianism.

Ben Fountain's most recent book is the novel Rasputin Swims the Potomac. His work has received the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, among other honors, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award. A former practicing attorney in Texas, he now lives in eastern North Carolina.

Fountain is in conversation with Stephen Kearse, the author of Liquid Snakes, In the Heat of the Light, and Post, a forthcoming novel about the U.S. Post Office. His short fiction has been published in Joyland, The Deadlands, FIYAH, and Plotter. He works as a journalist and lives in metro Washington, D.C., with his family. He has never swam the Potomac, but he enjoys walking along it.

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