Signed
Anthem
Signed first edition, 2022
Noah Hawley's Anthem is a near-future dystopian novel set in an America coming apart at its seams, where political tribalism, environmental collapse, gun violence, and a rising wave of teenage suicides have become the texture of daily life. Hawley is best known as the creator and showrunner of the television series Fargo and Legion, and brings to fiction the same dark satirical intelligence and structural restlessness that distinguishes his screen work.
Signed copy. Signed by Hawley on a special tipped-in page by the publisher.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, boards. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2022. ISBN: 9781538722084. #11282.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Signed copy. Signed by Hawley on a special tipped-in page by the publisher.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, boards. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2022. ISBN: 9781538722084. #11282.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Additional Details
Noah Hawley’s Anthem opens in a country where teenagers are taking their own lives in epidemic numbers, a phenomenon the narrative treats not as tragedy in isolation but as a direct response to a world that has made the future feel foreclosed. Simon Oliver is the son of the CEO of Rise Pharmaceuticals, a company whose opioid-adjacent products have made his family wealthy and his country sicker. When his sister Claire ends her life using pills from their father's company, covering the bathroom in their red packaging as a final statement, Simon is sent to the Float Anxiety Abatement Center, a psychiatric facility for children of means. There he meets Louise Conklin and a boy called the Prophet, and the three of them escape into a country that is barely holding together.
What follows is structured as a road novel, a quest, and an allegory simultaneously, moving across a landscape populated by vigilante militias, environmental wreckage, and a figure known as the Wizard, a Jeffrey Epstein-type predator whose wealth insulates him from consequence. Hawley populates the book with a large and deliberately varied cast, shifting between perspectives and occasionally stepping outside the narrative entirely to address the reader directly. There is a restlessness to the narrative that feels intentional. The book is not trying to be a conventional thriller, and readers who come to it expecting one will find something else. Hawley shines a light on what he sees as the catastrophe of contemporary American life, using a group of endangered young people to serve as both indictment and, however tentatively, as hope.
Hawley lists among his literary influences DeLillo, Vonnegut, García Márquez, and Kundera, and Anthem has the ambition of that company even when it doesn't always achieve their precision. Some reviewers found the book unwieldy, and the criticism is not without basis. It is a large, loud, sometimes undisciplined novel. But there is genuine feeling underneath the noise, and a deeply personal closing note addressed to Hawley's own children about what it means to be a parent watching a world you helped build become one you are frightened to leave to them. That honesty, the fear and tenderness of it, gives the book a gravity that its more satirical passages sometimes obscure. Anthem is the work of a writer who is genuinely angry and genuinely scared, and who found in the dystopian form a way to say so.
What follows is structured as a road novel, a quest, and an allegory simultaneously, moving across a landscape populated by vigilante militias, environmental wreckage, and a figure known as the Wizard, a Jeffrey Epstein-type predator whose wealth insulates him from consequence. Hawley populates the book with a large and deliberately varied cast, shifting between perspectives and occasionally stepping outside the narrative entirely to address the reader directly. There is a restlessness to the narrative that feels intentional. The book is not trying to be a conventional thriller, and readers who come to it expecting one will find something else. Hawley shines a light on what he sees as the catastrophe of contemporary American life, using a group of endangered young people to serve as both indictment and, however tentatively, as hope.
Hawley lists among his literary influences DeLillo, Vonnegut, García Márquez, and Kundera, and Anthem has the ambition of that company even when it doesn't always achieve their precision. Some reviewers found the book unwieldy, and the criticism is not without basis. It is a large, loud, sometimes undisciplined novel. But there is genuine feeling underneath the noise, and a deeply personal closing note addressed to Hawley's own children about what it means to be a parent watching a world you helped build become one you are frightened to leave to them. That honesty, the fear and tenderness of it, gives the book a gravity that its more satirical passages sometimes obscure. Anthem is the work of a writer who is genuinely angry and genuinely scared, and who found in the dystopian form a way to say so.