Preorders Available 10.01.21

“I am a different kind of philosopher. For Socrates, philosophy was made of dialogue; for me, it’s action. For Socrates, it was something the world did to you; for me, it’s something you do to the world.” 

Mike Long, a.k.a. Michael Rider, a.k.a. Knight Rider—frustrated philosopher and ersatz office manager—finds himself charged with misdemeanor stalking, simple assault, and planning a terrorist attack, at the end of a very rough work week that includes late-night stakeouts of the new woman in payable, fistfights with the IT guy, pissing in the elevator, and more than one happy hour at Chili’s. This is his apology, not an expression of regret, but a justification. 

Praise

"I am the blurber and you the blurbed at, and beyond that truism we shall eschew the literary within this utterance: The Apology is damned weird business. To attempt explication is to sound even dumber, but who cares: I do not mean the typical pushed-strange weird, I mean the weird of the pushed banal. The mundane taken to some kind of fascinating negative power. If you want some damned weird business, take Mr.TeBordo home with you."—Padgett Powell, author of Edisto and The Interrogative Mood

Christian TeBordo's The Apology is exactly the book I keep searching for: insightful, scathing, sharp, and bitterly, wonderfully funny. TeBordo's failed philosopher Michael Long belongs to the great pantheon of literary misanthropes and miscreants, alongside such creations as Milán Füst's Captain Störr and Nabokov's Hermann Karlovich. With a narrative driven by equal parts longing, repulsion, and sympathy, The Apology is as convincing as it is irresistible.—James Tadd Adcox, author of Repetition and Does Not Love

“If Thomas Pynchon and Socrates teamed up for the sequel to Office Space, you might have something half as wild and wise as Christian TeBordo’s sinewy new novel, The Apology. A fiercely funny and unapologetically fresh take on the topics of forgiveness and fate. This is a brilliant book by one of the literary landscape's leading lights.—Ryan Ridge, author of New Bad News

“Christian TeBordo is a satirist, stylist, and trickster of the highest order.”—Catherine Lacey, author of Pew and Certain American States

Author Bio