Muck: A Novel

In a Jerusalem both ancient and modern, where the First Temple squats over the populace like a Trump casino, two young poets are about to have their lives turned upside down. Struggling Jeremiah is worried that he might be wasting his time trying to be a writer; the great critic Broch just beat him over the head with his own computer keyboard. Mattaniah, on the other hand, is a real up-and-comer-but he has a secret he wouldn't want anyone in the literary world to know: his late father was king of Judah. Jeremiah begins to despair, and that despair yields a vision: that Jerusalem is doomed, and that Mattaniah will not only be forced to ascend to the throne but will thereafter witness his people slaughtered and exiled. But what does it mean to tell a friend and rival that his future is bleak? Can the very act of speaking a prediction aloud make it come true? If so, does that make you a seer, or just a schmuck? Dramatizing the eternal dispute between haves and have-nots, between poetry and power, Dror Burstein's Muck is a brilliant and subversive retelling of the book of Jeremiah: a profoundly funny comedy with apocalyptic stakes. . For readers of David Grossman and Etgar Keret