Theater-State by Jack Boettcher eBook
“Even though the principal in Boettcher’s Theater-State has a white tiger slumbering in his office, the school that Janus and Katydid and Cassie attend, with Ms. Denton, TX as their teacher, is all too familiar—terrifyingly familiar. The mind-bending cross over between the world of statecraft and a private science academy becomes all too real for Janus . . . when it is revealed that it is drivers that shape the roads and not the other way around. . . . and when the general paranoid lyricism of Boettcher’s odd and compelling novel, like the Mayan ceremonial white roads, leads you not necessarily to a destination but on a journey. It’s an amazing journey. I don’t think you have any choice but to take it.” —Matthew Rohrer Praise
This digital download includes .epub and .prc files
“Even though the principal in Boettcher’s Theater-State has a white tiger slumbering in his office, the school that Janus and Katydid and Cassie attend, with Ms. Denton, TX as their teacher, is all too familiar—terrifyingly familiar. The mind-bending cross over between the world of statecraft and a private science academy becomes all too real for Janus . . . when it is revealed that it is drivers that shape the roads and not the other way around. . . . and when the general paranoid lyricism of Boettcher’s odd and compelling novel, like the Mayan ceremonial white roads, leads you not necessarily to a destination but on a journey. It’s an amazing journey. I don’t think you have any choice but to take it.” —Matthew Rohrer Praise
This digital download includes .epub and .prc files
“Even though the principal in Boettcher’s Theater-State has a white tiger slumbering in his office, the school that Janus and Katydid and Cassie attend, with Ms. Denton, TX as their teacher, is all too familiar—terrifyingly familiar. The mind-bending cross over between the world of statecraft and a private science academy becomes all too real for Janus . . . when it is revealed that it is drivers that shape the roads and not the other way around. . . . and when the general paranoid lyricism of Boettcher’s odd and compelling novel, like the Mayan ceremonial white roads, leads you not necessarily to a destination but on a journey. It’s an amazing journey. I don’t think you have any choice but to take it.” —Matthew Rohrer Praise
This digital download includes .epub and .prc files
PRAISE
“Theater-State reveals the panopticon not as an instrument of surveillance but as a mesmerizing holograph from which we prisoners of ‘reality’ (and of high school) cannot tear our eyes. In this inside-out world, violence is an encircling Megahighway and the center mutable, vulnerable, and virtual, always flowing somewhere else. As young Janus negotiates the heights and sinkholes of adolescence, including an affair with a regional pop-avatar, servitude to a morphing, megalomaniacal principal, and a class project managing a convulsive neocolony, Jack Boettcher’s reticulated sentences themselves contract and unfurl with sometimes enticing, sometimes ensnaring beauty.” —Joyelle McSweeney
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jack Boettcher lives in Austin, Texas. He is the author of the chapbook The Deviants (Greying Ghost), and his writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review, DIAGRAM, and Puerto del Sol, among others. He has a Norwegian forest cat named Mr. X, but like him the cat is from Mississippi, not Norway.
