Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    X Out Of Wonderland
    X Out Of Wonderland
    X Out Of Wonderland
    Ebook142 pages2 hours

    X Out Of Wonderland

    By David Allan Cates

    3/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    X, the novel’s decent and brave protagonist, maintains his optimistic pursuit of love and The Good Life even as a string of catastrophies brutalize him through a series of misadventures that take him around the world. While pointing up the absurdities of our own times, X Out of Wonderland also shows clearly the universal predicament of all humans in all cultures in all times: the need to find meaning and dignity in our lives despite the certainty of death and suffering. The story makes clear that despite our folly, we’ve got a few things going for us: faith, hope, love, and the capacity to endure.

    “A biting satire of modern capitalism . . . Cates delivers a caustic but never cynical take on what he sees as the demoralizing fatalism implicit in today’s market-mad ideology.”
    — Publishers Weekly

    “Cates’s world is futuristic in tone yet based on our very own world today, in a witty, skillful, amusing — and unrelentingly clear-eyed — satire.”
    — Kirkus

    “Cates packs in quite a story . . . making Wonderland read like a Kafkaesque rendition of George Orwell’s 1984.”
    — Willamette Week

    “A pitch-perfect satirical novel that’s both fun and wrenching.”
    — The Missoulian

    “It takes a brave writer to tackle all of it — the complete and crushing madness of our time. It takes an extraordinarily talented writer to succeed. X Out of Wonderland is a smart bomb guided by a laser wit.”
    —Richard Manning, author of Against the Grain:
    How Agriculture Hijacked Civilization

    “If Lewis Carroll covered international trade for the Wall Street Journal, if Lemony Snicket wrote an exposé of the World Trade Organization, if Swift replaced Rukeyser on Wall $treet Week and de Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince replaced Lou Dobbs on Moneyline, the result would not be stranger or more fun to read than David Cates’s send-up of ‘free trade.’ This twenty-first-century fable of international commerce packs the creepily comic truth-telling of the nineteenth-century’s finest satirists.”
    — David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K

    “X Out of Wonderland is an amazingly cheerful and inventive piece, written with a Mozartian ease, grace, and flourish. Cates writes suppressing a smile on his face, but one will appear on yours as you read this tale.”
    — Josip Novakovich, author of April Fool’s Day

    “In X Out of Wonderland, God speaks but doesn’t give away any secrets. This is Candide in Kafka-land, David Cates’s stunning modernist take on our culture (the glories of the Global Free Market), along with his intimate regard for folks enduring their condition while loving one another anyway.”
    — William Kittredge, author of Who Owns the West?

    “David Cates uses lilting, wide-eyed language to describe a pilgrim’s wanderings through a world so terrifying in its priorities that it might even be our own. The result is a darkly beautiful tale, sly and grief-stricken, funny and enraged.”
    — Deidre McNamer, author of My Russian

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDavid Allan Cates
    Release dateJul 9, 2012
    ISBN9781452451909
    X Out Of Wonderland
    Author

    David Allan Cates

    David Allan Cates is the author of five novels, and a collection of poetry, The Mysterious Location of Kyrgyzstan. His novel Hunger In America was a New York Times Notable Book, X Out Of Wonderland and Freeman Walker, both Montana Book Award Honor Books; and Ben Armstrong’s Strange Trip Home and Tom Connor's Gift were both winners of Gold Medal for Best Fiction in the Independent Book Publishers Book Awards.Cates is the winner of the 2010 Montana Arts Council’s Innovative Artist Award . His stories and poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines, and his travel articles in Outside Magazine and the New York Times Sophisticated Traveler.

    Read more from David Allan Cates

    Related to X Out Of Wonderland

    Related ebooks

    General Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Book Club

      Apr 27, 2022

      Book Club
      5 min read

    • Article

      Four Of A Kind

      May 3, 2023

      Four Of A Kind
      4 min read

    • Article

      My Dinner with Denis Johnson

      Jun 25, 2018

      My Dinner with Denis Johnson
      13 min read

    • Article

      Where Is Black Life Lived?

      Jul 21, 2020

      Where Is Black Life Lived?
      6 min read

    • Article

      Part 1 WHEN FISH FLY: The Revolt on the Slave Ship Creole

      Jan 1, 2022

      Part 1 WHEN FISH FLY: The Revolt on the Slave Ship Creole
      6 min read

    • Article

      Previews

      Jan 12, 2020

      Previews
      3 min read

    • Article

      A Haunting

      Aug 15, 2023

      A Haunting
      10 min read

    • Article

      Book Club

      May 25, 2022

      Book Club
      5 min read

    • Article

      Excerpts From The Works Of The 2024 Whiting Award Winners

      Apr 10, 2024

      The 2024 Whiting Award winners were announced Wednesday night. Below are excerpts from their work.

      19 min read

    • Article

      Not Everything Turns to Gold

      Oct 2, 2018

      Theodore Roosevelt once said, “When I am in California, I am not in the West, I am west of the West.” The Rough Rider’s koan has been widely viewed as a celebration of the limitless California adventure, but it’s also a reminder of the dizzying, vert

      4 min read

    • Article

      Discarded Wraith Of Apartheid

      Apr 13, 2024

      It’s been years since I read a book that strained the Likability Principle as viscerally as Karen Jennings’ new book, Crooked Seeds. Her previous novel, An Island, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, but I fear the more I tell you about Crooked Seed

      2 min read

    • Article

      Second Language

      Aug 14, 2017

      Second Language
      9 min read

    • Article

      The Social Picnic

      May 15, 2022

      The Social Picnic
      2 min read

    • Article

      Fourteen FROM DARK TO LIGHT

      Apr 8, 2020

      Fourteen FROM DARK TO LIGHT
      5 min read

    • Article

      Announcing the Winners Of Our 100-WORD CONTEST

      Jul 17, 2021

      Eager to try your hand at the 100-word genre? Submit your best work – fiction or nonfiction – in just 100 words in our second annual 100-Word Contest, returning this fall. Bookmark writermag.com/contests for more information. BY ALICIA LUNA Today, I

      5 min read

    • Article

      Angel Lust

      Jan 25, 2022

      Angel Lust
      8 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Nov 1, 2018

      Our house in the 100-year flood plainflooded. They say thatfor another 800 years a hurricanelike this will not come. My internetis down and my smart phone hurts my thumbsarthritic. I’m running out of data.All my books are in boxes. Please referto my

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Silent Witness

      Jun 14, 2023

      The Silent Witness
      7 min read

    • Article

      Any Given Day

      Mar 29, 2021

      Any Given Day
      11 min read

    • Article

      Allan Gurganus

      Mar 9, 2021

      Allan Gurganus
      30 min read

    • Article

      The Silent Witness

      Jun 14, 2023

      The Silent Witness
      7 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for X Out Of Wonderland

    3/5

    12 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Awesome sendup of the religion of the free market. How can a subject so dire make you giggle so much?
    • 1/5
      An attempted remake of Voltaire's "Candide" for the modern age, skewering globalization, commercialism, big business, etc., but the writing is not even close to being up to par.

    Book preview

    X Out Of Wonderland - David Allan Cates

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1