Description

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A virtuoso journey into networks of power, our embroilment with new technologies, and the dangers of corruption, by an electrifying debut novelist.

When the investigative reporter Quentin Jones’s story about covert military interrogation practices in the Desert War is buried, he is spurred to dig deeper, and he unravels a trail that leads to VIRTUE: cutting-edge technology that simulates reality during interrogation.

As the shadowy labyrinths of governmental corruption unfurl and tighten around him, unnerving links to his protégé Bruce—who, like Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz, disappeared into the war several years earlier—keep emerging.

Greg Jackson's The Dimensions of a Cave is a virtuoso journey into networks of power, our embroilment with new technologies, and the dangers of corruption. It explores our drive toward war, violence, and venality, placing humanity and idealism under the spotlight.

About the Author

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Greg Jackson is author of Prodigals: Stories, for which he received the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 award and the Bard Fiction Prize. In 2017, he was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. His fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, Tin House, Vice, Conjunctions, Virginia Quarterly Review, the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Guardian, among other places.

Praise For…

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"Jackson’s inspired debut novel recasts Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Plato’s allegory of the cave for the information age . . . The book’s characters, including government bureaucrats, warlords, and bohemian artists, tend to expound at length, their voices nearly indistinguishable but their tales florid and spellbinding . . . [The Dimensions of a Cave is] a timely and clear-eyed interrogation of the fictions that shield people from society’s blinding truths.” —Publishers Weekly

“Greg Jackson’s The Dimensions of a Cave is, sentence to sentence, a linguistic marvel, a genre-bending tale with moral and philosophical stakes as profound as they come.” —Dinaw Mengestu, author of All Our Names

“Greg Jackson is an athletically talented writer who packs so much into every single sentence and scene it almost scares me. His debut novel is somehow both a hardboiled thriller and a philosophical treatise with dialogues that would make Sorkin blush.” —Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X

“Greg Jackson’s prose is sly, wise, and almost self-consciously heroic, undaunted by the present moment, though it threatens to be our last.” —Joshua Cohen, author of The Netanyahus

“The Dimensions of a Cave tells a very contemporary story about surveillance capitalism, virtual reality, and twenty-first-century forever war, but it will still be read a century from now for the news it brings about the timeless riddle of the human self. That sounds like dust-jacket hyperbole, I know, but this book seems as likely to last as anything I’ve read in years. It’s increasingly rare these days to find a novelist with Greg Jackson’s world-swallowing ambition, and rarer still for one to make good on that ambition as gloriously as Jackson does here.” —Christopher Beha, author of The Index of Self-Destructive Acts

“Greg Jackson’s first novel, after his terrific story collection, Prodigals, is an ambitious and challenging work about the lies that men and journalism and government tell about each other and themselves. If Bob Woodward were to find himself in a twenty-first-century Pynchon novel, this might well be the result.” —Keith Gessen, author of A Terrible Country