This book will help you understand that you can study dog poetry, become the Minnesota Twins closer, run for president of the United States, become a Franciscan friar in Albuquerque, put oranges in a circle, teach conflicting political theory at the University of Idaho, attend Mass literally underground in a subterranean cathedral hundreds of feet below the desert floor, play no-pads tackle football on Boise State’s blue turf, write tracts while sunbathing atop Namur’s castle in summer, discuss constitutional originalism while getting a back rub, and fight an overwhelming abundance of bad actors bent on the familiar project of world domination.
But this time, nuclear weapons are not background noise. They are out in the open.
This time, a single footnote takes you to Illinois, Italy, and Iceland’s Blue Lagoon.
And this time, the central love story is not a disposable romance between twenty-somethings drifting through a Saturday afternoon. It is a volatile sixty-something power couple, she far left, he far right, together perhaps more explosive than the bombs themselves.
This book will help you understand that you can do these things, or at least try to do them, or failing that, read about others doing them. You have free will. This also means it is your fault. Do not add to your long list of mistakes by missing this book.
Thermonuclear Mirth is unique on the contemporary fiction landscape, Catholic or otherwise. In an age where fiction defaults to dragons, knights, and elaborate fantasy scaffolding, this novel offers none of that. It is a fictional account of real life in a future that might plausibly arrive, not one that could never exist, and it asks what can be done in response by applying eternal truths from cover to cover.
At times sincere, absurd, and extremely absurd, the book may make you cry, laugh until you cry, feel guilty about your pull-up count, and briefly consider learning a foreign language. It is at times profane, vulgar, and base, not as an end in itself, but to show the reality of sin alongside the reality of beer, politics at Thanksgiving dinner, Rottweilers, Lake Zurich, Rhode Island Red hens, and all the rest.
Thermonuclear Mirth is a book about real life in all its disorder, down to the bottom of the well, but also about the certainty that solutions exist, and that there remains a narrow path toward the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.
About the Author
Gracjan Kraszewski is the author of five books, including the novel Thermonuclear Mirth, the novella Seraphim and the Dust Plague, and the essay collection The Hippo Lectures, all published by Arouca Press, as well as the novel The Holdout and the Civil War history Catholic Confederates. He holds a PhD in history from Mississippi State University and has taught at universities in the Pacific Northwest and Midwest. He played baseball in college, professionally in Europe in the Czech Republic and Belgium, and for the Polish National Team.
