IN A WORLD THAT'S LIKE OURS BUT EVEN STRANGER . . . A TV star president is campaigning for a constitutionally dubious third term, normal Americans are falling into an unexplained weeping sickness and a wrestler claiming to be the reincarnated mystic Rasputin is making a spandex-clad entrance into politics. Meanwhile Clarence Thomas Jr. is a journalist just trying to make sense of his country as it unmoors from reality. But with violence and bullshit erupting everywhere, things seem to be approaching collapse. Or maybe it's all building to a grand gesture: something political, romantic, religious, insane and quite possibly fatal. From award-winning author Ben Fountain, Rasputin Swims the Potomac is outrageously funny, wildly imagined and razor-sharp satire. It asks: what could possibly grow out of what we have now, except for something even stranger, harder to grasp and more tumultuous? And will what comes next be better or, somehow, even worse?