The American People, Volume 2

A “beautiful and humane” alternate history of twentieth-century America, where an epidemic runs unchecked by the government (Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review).

In The American People: Volume 2: The Brutality of Fact, Larry Kramer completes his radical reimagining of his country’s history. Ranging from the brothels of 1950s Washington, D.C., to the activism of the 1980s and beyond, Kramer offers an elaborate phantasmagoria of bigoted conspiracists in the halls of power and ordinary individuals suffering their consequences. With wit and bite, Kramer explores (among other things) the sex lives of every recent president; the complicated behavior of America’s two greatest spies, J. Edgar Hoover and James Jesus Angleton; the rise of Sexopolis, the country’s favorite magazine; and the genocidal activities of every branch of our health-care and drug-delivery systems.

The American People: Volume 2 is narrated by (among others) the writer Fred Lemish and his two friends—Dr. Daniel Jerusalem, who works for America’s preeminent health-care institution, and his twin brother, David Jerusalem, a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp. Together they track a terrible plague that intensifies as the government ignores it. Here is a historical novel like no other—satiric and impassioned and driven by an uncompromising moral and literary vision.

“Takes your breath away.” ―Jeremy Lybarger, The Nation

“A queer epic of love and death.” ―Cathy Corman, The Provincetown Independent

“This is the greatest, most alarming, most insane AIDS novel anybody is ever going to write or want to write.“ ―Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Review

“Idiosyncratic, controversial, and eminently readable: a masterwork of alternative history.” ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)