DELIVER US. A Novel

Seattle: Alephactory Press, 2018. First edition. Hardcover. A very good copy in a near fine dust jacket. Signed by both authors on the title page. Comically absurd and painfully real, DELIVER US is a prescient and provocative literary novel that moves swiftly through near-future Detroit as a black social-media activist leads a campaign against Amazon, whose new fleet of delivery drones offers rebirth to the blighted city while threatening to magnify existing racial inequalities. When retiree Luther Prince shoots down an Amazon delivery drone flying over his (truncated) modest home in eastside Detroit, he gets slapped with criminal charges, and his granddaughter Piper takes to social media to campaign against the Seattlebased tech-giant, whose deal with the city and the FAA has given them two months to demonstrate the safety of their new drone delivery program. But are they saviors bringing jobs to the blighted city, or imperialists out for their own gain at the expense of Detroit's mostly black population? That's the question DELIVER US swirls around in an absurd and highstakes marketing battle for the soul of Detroit. One one side, Piper Prince and her guerrilla army composed of an aging graffiti legend, an androgynous local rapper, a white urban farmer, a hipster stand-up comic, and a teenage hacker. On the other, Amazon, Jeff Bezos, and his Detroit team, led by rising star Annika Dahl, Amazon's head of PR for Detroit, and Jamal Dent, a native Detroiter and former Air Force drone pilot returning to his home city at the head of Prime Air. And in this midst of this chaos, several awkward romances! Black and white, hipster and hood, Seattle and Detroit. Love blooms between arson, robbery, Krav Maga, and hip-hop. It struggles to thrive under a sky filled with ever-growing thickets of drones--drones with packages, drones with pizzas, drones with googly eyes delivering watermelons to church barbecues. With a wild style and a serious soul, this charming and challenging novel disentangles our historical inequalities and explores the pitfalls and opportunities of the future. (Inventory #: 15306)