It's an otherwise ordinary week in April, the week after Easter, 2009. Late in the week, a man wakes up in Guanajuato, Mexico with his knowledge intact, but with no memory of who he is, or how he came to live in Guanajuato. Early in the week, a venture capitalist sits at his desk in an office tower in Los Angeles, attempting to complete his business memoirs, but troubled by the fact that a recent deal appears to be some sort of money-laundering scheme. And in the middle of the week, just before dawn on April 15, two gunmen arrive at an El Paso motel to retrieve a duffel bag stuffed full of currency, and eliminate the man who brought it to El Paso. Thus begins the three-stranded narrative of Novel Explosives, a fiendishly funny search for identity that travels through the worlds of venture finance, the Juarez drug wars, and the latest innovations in thermobaric weaponry, a joyride of a novel with only one catch: the deeper into the book you go, the more dangerous it gets. At the palpitating heart of the novel, at its roiling fundamental core, lies an agonizing reappraisal of the way the U.S behaves in the world, a project that grows more urgent by the day.
"[Novel Explosives] is... fascinating... a pleasure... what my program Bookworm is for: to find books like this that are of enormous ambition and largely unknown to readers, and say, 'Hey get out there! Order the book! Try this out! You haven't seen anything like this before!'"
—Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm, 89.9 FM, KCRW, July 20, 2017
"Of all the books that we’ve promoted on this show, I think yours is the best, and deserves most the attention that it hasn’t gotten.... I had a similar feeling of elation finishing this book as I did when I wrapped Infinite Jest and The Instructions by Adam Levin. The puzzle is so fun to solve. At the sentence level, this book is a blast to read."
—Matt Bucher and David Laird, The Great Concavity, Podcast, May 10, 2019
". . . big, brainy, trippy, Technicolor noir . . ."
—Starred Kirkus Review, August 15, 2016
"An amazing novel, a literary masterpiece that reads like a thriller . . . the most fun reading I've had in ages."
—Steven Moore, author of The Novel: An Alternative History, January 2016
Jim Gauer is a mathematician, widely published poet, and possibly the world's only Marxist Venture Capitalist.
