Nobody really reads anymore, the statistics are pretty grim. Pew Research suggested last year 40% of Americans read no book at all, 27% read up to four books and 19% — what Pew called “Heavy Readers” (no irony alas) read more than ten. Those heavy readers are propping up the dying industry, but not particularly well. Meanwhile, publishers are focusing on titles and authors who are guaranteed to make money for their dying industry, Tom Clancy, the next J.K. Rowling book where a pot-bellied balding middle aged Harry kills Voldemort — again — who comes back to life — again. A tell all about sex in some public building.

I have written six or seven novels, a play, a book of poetry. I have a memoir of sorts forthcoming, to be released when the politics of life allows me to publish it. Each one specially crafted, each one appealing to some new idea, some new thought, some new experience. Mostly I would write after finishing a tour in some lost place struggling to be free. A two-part story on Venezuela’s political collapse, told with magical realism because that is the only way to tell stories about South America. A tale of a jihadi from Timbuktu. A dark, violent novel about life in Uganda’s Lords Resistance Army. A short, lamenting story about an old bookseller from Yerevan who just needed to write his last book, and how. My play is the story of a political prisoner, because that has been something that has consumed my imagination for many years.

Why do I write, if nobody reads and I am not known? Insanity it is said is doing the same thing over and over expecting somehow this time it will turn out different. Maybe I should instead do little dance routines on TikTok? Maybe I should ask my wife if she’d be willing to take her clothes off for the drooling denizens of OnlyFans? Why write at all, when Americans (and the West) can only digest 140 character insults?

I have no idea. I am insane.

As part of that, I spent the summer re-reading “The Unraveling”, my dystopian novel. I had to go back to it and fix it, it is the greatest work of my mind. Not simple at all like my Armenia novel and not visceral at all like my Uganda one. It is layered and complex and took me about 5 years to write and I needed to let it breathe and then return to it to see if all the threads connected. I fixed some stuff, and polished it a little, to give it back to you, reader, in the off chance that somebody out there can still read something as magnificent as “The Unraveling”. It is my masterpiece, my Huxley, my Orwell, my Zamyatin.

Here it is. If I could, I would beg, please read my novel. Then buy another, and another. Then move on to other authors; find another and another as your brain grows to absorb that which only a novel can give you. Put down your phone, and read. And remember, if you spend the $20 on my novel — which will cost you a popcorn at the movies or an uber ride to the bar where you partake in the last legal drug, the returns on that flow forward into eternity as you participate in something as timeless as reading and building a library for yourself.