The Public Burning

“A great work of art, the kind of book you come across once in a lifetime.”—The Washington Post

“An extraordinary act of moral passion.”—New York Times Book Review

Robert Coover's controversial 1977 bestseller is a masterpiece of American political satire about Cold War paranoia, mass hysteria, and the manufacture of political myth—now in a fiftieth-anniversary edition with a new introduction by Alexander Nazaryan

Isn't that a hell of a thing—that the fate of a great country can depend on camera angles?

A controversial bestseller when it was first published in 1977, Robert Coover's The Public Burning has since emerged as one of the most influential novels of our time.

It reimagines the three fateful days in 1953 that ended in the execution of alleged atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Vice President Richard Nixon—the voraciously ambitious bad boy of the Eisenhower regime—is the dominant narrator in an enormous cast that includes Betty Crocker, Joe McCarthy, the Marx Brothers, Walter Winchell, Uncle Sam, his adversary The Phantom, and Time magazine incarnated as the National Poet Laureate. All of these and thousands more converge in Times Square for the carnivalesque auto-da-fé at which the Rosenbergs are put to death. And not a person present escapes implication in Cold War America's ruthless "public burning."

Fifty years on, this blistering satire of manufactured consent and America's politics of spectacle has never been more relevant. Essential reading for fans of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Kurt Vonnegut, The Public Burning is the rare classic that has only grown more urgent with time.