The Big Red Herring by Andrew Farkas

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One of Entropy's Best Fiction Books of 2019


The Crying of Lot 49, but funny.

A Confederacy of Dunces, but sharp.

The Big Sleep, but on acid.



In this latest work by Andrew Farkas, the United States and the Soviet Union were allies, not enemies. The moon landing was a hoax filmed by Stanley Kubrick. The Space Race and the Cold War were diversions enacted to cover up the biggest secret ever kept.


But Wallace Heath Orcuson (Wall to his friends) has more immediate problems to deal with. He’s just woken up in an apartment he’s never seen before. There’s a dead body under his couch. It’s his girlfriend’s husband, a man named “Senator” Kipper Maris.


Meanwhile, at a donut shop, a radio narrator, who’s been forced to adopt the name Edward R. Murrow, reads Wall’s story. He hates it. He wants to change it. The problem: Murrow is a narrator, not a writer, and the penalty for altering a manuscript is death. Luckily for Murrow, his boss, “Senator” Kipper Maris, was recently murdered. So maybe no one will notice. Or maybe there’s a reason for the rule.

​

​But you can’t find out what’s in Pandora’s box until it’s opened, right?

Who wants to see what’s inside?


Cover art by Scott Schulman

In his truly wild first novel, Andrew Farkas smashes history straight through the looking glass to offer a world of Orwellian chill and Strangelovian élan.  Indeed, the whole beautifully complex, carnivalesque bundle dances with uncommonly light and dexterous step. Even when it gets dark.  And man does it ever. The Big Red Herring is a revisioned century’s worth of truth and hoax, pain and fun.
- Laird Hunt, author of In the House in the Dark of the Woods, The Evening Road, and Neverhome

It is thought the Earth (beginning with the invention of radio) pulses when regarded from the vastness of outer space. Our broadcasts broadly broadcast, an electromagnetic soup to nuts, every transmitted signal still expanding outward through the ether. The Big Red Herring, Andrew Farkas’s vibrant pulsar of a book, generates accommodating light, both particle and wave, piggybacked and packed with rich dense packages of info and intel. Not a mere novel but a kind of juiced and jumpy step-up transformer, its radiation bands, like our universe, inexplicable accelerating, irresistible, multidimensional (quantum and string).  Farkas is the new Newton of narration, standing on the shoulders of giants, yes, but double clutching this shift of the novel’s paradigm. There’s no stopping this novel Novel, this new New.
- Michael Martone, author of Brooding and The Moon Over Wapakoneta

Andrew Farkas is the author of a novel, The Big Red Herring (KERNPUNKT Press), and two short fiction collections: Sunsphere (BlazeVOX Books) and Self-Titled Debut (Subito Press). His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, North American Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Florida Review,Western Humanities Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. He has been thrice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, including one Special Mention inPushcart Prize XXXV and one Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2013. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago, an M.F.A. from the University of Alabama, an M.A. from the University of Tennessee, and a B.A. from Kent State University. He is a fiction editor for The Collagist and an Assistant Professor of English at Washburn University. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas.
PRESS
​- Entropy's Best Fiction Books of 2019
- Interview in Heavy Feather Review
- Article in CJOnline
- Review in Publisher's Weekly
- Interview with Rob McLennan
- Interview in Kenyon Review
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