NO MAN IS AN ISLAND—WITH ONE EXCEPTION

In Travis Jeppesen's Settlers Landing, a wholly fantastic yet nightmarishly real excavation of the Trumpian malaise, Mrdok is a self-made billionaire who has everything he wants and needs, and quite often, too much of it. What he does not yet have is his own private island. So when he discovers Sagosia, a former pirate colony in the lost Pseudotropical region known as the Brown Sea, he takes it over the only way he knows how—roughly, and under the guise of “philanthropy.” But merely possessing his own slice of offshore land isn’t enough; together with his algorithmically selected band of .01% elites, he elects to declare sovereignty and launch his very own country.  It will be the deal of the century. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, a lot, it turns out—especially when you throw in an infinite-release opioid manufactured by North Koreans, a CIA-funded civil war being fought by veterans afflicted with untreated PTSD, a poet laureate suffering from aphasia, and a dog that speaks in rhyme—to name just a few of the tributaries in this relentlessly inventive narrative, a brutal and pyrotechnic satire of a very awkward Zeitgeist that mercilessly fracks the dreams of colonial conquest haunting our history, literature, and consciousness.

ADDITIONAL BUYING OPTIONS

  • “Posthumanism is a post-linguistic trope and the pollutant by-product of, well, humanism, which slicks the shores of Settlers Landing – a “tiny ass” “shitty little” island that’s also a big-gulp masterwork by the bard of American exile, Travis Jeppesen.” —Joshua Cohen, author of The Netanyahus

    “With a mix of premeditation and spontaneous ideation, Jeppesen’s writing both unleashes and is shaped by a torrent of concise, pithy and luminous observations, tied together in syntactical bundles that both defy stable significations and ground them in the object.” —Daniel Sherer, Princeton University

    Praise for Earlier Books:

    “One of the most interesting writers around.” —Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and Satin Island

    “A major voice in alternative literary fiction . . . rich, lyrical language reminiscent of a modern-day Faulkner informed by the postmodern narrative strategies of Dennis Cooper.” —Library Journal

    “Any attempts to trace the tributaries of Jeppesen's influences fall away after a dozen pages because his voice is a fiercely independent and fresh one that casts a spell on the reader.” —The Stranger

    “Jeppesen's prose is stunning in its originality and power.” —Bookslut

  • TRAVIS JEPPESEN is the author of ten books, including The Suiciders, Victims, and See You Again in Pyongyang. He has contributed articles to The New York Times Magazine, Artforum, Mousse, Wall Street Journal, The Believer, Review of Contemporary Fiction, and other media. An accomplished art critic, he is the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. His calligraphic and text-based artwork has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Wilkinson Gallery (London), Exile (Berlin), and Rupert (Vilnius), and featured in group exhibitions internationally. Jeppesen curates a living archive of his work at travisjeppesen.substack.com.