A Naked Singularity

The University of Chicago Press does not generally publish new American fiction. However, last winter, we started hearing from people we trusted about a stunning debut novel that no trade house had been willing to take a chance on—to the point that the author had given up and self-published it. We got a copy, and we were blown away.

It's not hard to see why publishers would be scared off by this book: it is a 700-page first novel by a nobody with no connections. But what's a university press for, if not to publish books we believe in that don't necessarily fit into the hit machine? And we believe in this book: it's an epoch-defining kind of novel, and the announcement of a once-in-a-generation kind of talent.

A Naked Singularity is about Casi, a child of Colombian immigrants who lives in Brooklyn and works in Manhattan as a public defender—one who, tellingly, has never lost a trial. Never. In the book, we watch what happens when his sense of justice and even his sense of self begin to crack—and how his world then slowly devolves.

It's a huge, ambitious novel clearly in the vein of DeLillo, Foster Wallace, Pynchon, and even Melville, and it's told in a distinct, frequently hilarious voice, with a striking human empathy at its center. Its panoramic reach takes readers through crime and courts, immigrant families and urban blight, media savagery and media satire, scatology and boxing, and even a breathless heist worthy of any crime novel.

If Infinite Jest stuck a pin in the map of mid-90s culture and drew its trajectory from there, A Naked Singularity does the same for the feeling of surfeit, brokenness, and exhaustion that permeates our civic and cultural life today. In the opening sentence of William Gaddis' A Frolic of His Own, a character sneers, "Justice? You get justice in the next world. In this world, you get the law." A Naked Singularity reveals the extent of that gap, and lands firmly on the side of those who are forever getting the law.