James Knisely

The Black Bookends

A New Novel, Seeking Representation

The Black Bookends is a preposterously funny satire about a parole officer who finds himself trapped between the madness of working with criminal offenders and the insanity of the correctional bureaucracy while a dark and menacing mystery begins to swirl beneath him, threatening to drag him down to his undeserved demise. It’s Joseph Heller meets Dashiell Hammett in Bob Woodward’s parking garage, satirizing civil bureaucracy, human frailty, and the corporate enterprise in much the way Catch-22 roasts the military. At once ridiculous and devastating, it achieves dramatic tension between the hilarious and the tragic, the grim and the absurd.