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Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World

A Novel

Donald Antrim

Picador

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opens in a new window Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World Download image

ISBN10: 0312662106
ISBN13: 9780312662103

Paperback

192 Pages

$18.00

CA$24.50

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In the seaside community of Donald Antrim's Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, the citizens are restless. The mayor has fired stinger missiles into the Botanical Garden reflecting pool, and his public execution was a messy affair. As these hawkish suburbanites fortify their houses with deadly moats and land mines, a former third-grade teacher named Pete Robinson steps forward with a tenuous bid to replace the mayor. But can anyone satisfy the terrible will of the people? By turns funny and phantasmagorical, fiercely intelligent and imaginative, Donald Antrim's story of suburban civics turned macabre is a new American classic.

Reviews

Praise for Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World

"A dark, suburban fantasy . . . richly funny, even whimsical, and bizarrely familiar." —The New Yorker

"Entertaining and mischievously imagined . . . Antrim is a wonderful, truly original comic writer." —San Francisco Chronicle



"A slice of sulfurous whimsy… You are draw in because of the depth of human feeling that Antrim smuggles in… almost below the radar level." —The New York Times


"The author's surreal vision is both imaginative and wholly his own . . . A striking literary discovery." —The Boston Globe

Reviews from Goodreads

BOOK EXCERPTS

Read an Excerpt

SEE A TOWN
stucco-pink, fishbelly-white, done up in wisteria and swaying palms and smelling of rotted fruits broken beneath trees: mango, papaya, delicious tangerine; imagine this town rising from coral shoals bleached and cutting upward...

About the author

Donald Antrim

Donald Antrim is the critically acclaimed author of Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, The Hundred Brothers, and The Verificationist, as well The Afterlife, a memoir about his mother. A regular contributor to The New Yorker, he has also been the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Public Library. He lives in New York City.

Ulrike Schamoni

Read a profile of the author in the New York Times