Fiction. PETER: AN (A)HISTORICAL ROMANCE, a controversial new novel by one of our most important, innovative, and uncompromising authors re-envisions Herman Melville's Pierre in 1999 Los Angeles. An orphaned child of privilege, Peter enjoys a snug existence full of things--to eat, to wear, and to play with. But his world is rocked when he meets a young Palestinian woman, Reham, who claims to be Peter's half-sister. DeShell's excessive, digressive opera of objects follows these two to Istanbul, Jerusalem, and Gaza City, teetering on the razor's edge between obsession and rejection, fascination and disgust. "A trenchant indictment of everything rampant materialism sought to co-opt in the late 1990s--love, individuality, history, cultural identity"--TimeOut Chicago. "By turns hilariousand harrowing, Peter is pure dynamite"--Laird Hunt.

Jeffrey DeShell is the author of four novels: Peter: An (A)Historical Romance (Starcherone 2006), The Trouble with Being Born (FC2 2008), S & M and In Heaven Everything is Fine (FC2) and a critical book, The Peculiarity of Literature: An Allegorical Approach to Poe's Fiction. He has co-edited two collections of fiction by American women, Chick-Lit I: Postfeminist Fiction and Chick-Lit II: No Chick Vics (FC2), and was a Fulbright Teaching Fellow in Budapest, Hungary, 1999-2000. He has taught in Northern Cyprus, the American Midwest and was on the faculty of the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College. He is currently an associate professor and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder.