Own Little Worlds

Own Little Worlds is a political dark comedy set in post-Trump America. A bomb destroys a Japanese cargo ship in the port of Jacksonville four days before a presidential election, and a retired editor and a laid-off reporter follow the conspiracy from there.

About two-thirds of the way in, the novel stops being a novel and becomes a play, then turns back. The play section gathers the full cast onto one stage; the prose then absorbs the gathering and continues. The publisher's own back-cover line frames the book as a shape-shifter and signs off with the tagline "a tragedy you can dance to."

Own Little Worlds won the 2020 Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel, recognized for the pacing and voice that hold a political comedy together across a structural shift the book itself names, and for the rare success of a comic novel that is also a tragedy.