Xiyu (洗浴) is the Chinese word for bathhouse, a microcosm of Chinese society and the primary setting for Isham Cook’s latest adventures in China (familiar as the protagonist of his previous novel Lust and Philosophy). The problem this time, however, is that he doesn’t know how he got there. Abruptly and helplessly Isham is flung back and forth between China and the US at random points in the future, teleported by unknown forces.
China is rapidly growing wealthy with its economic might. The shabby “luxury” bathhouses of present-day Beijing are now genuine erotic utopias surpassing anything the ancient Romans ever dreamed up in their great baths. China is also rapidly taking over large parts of the world, including the USA, at first outsourcing the running of the country to Americans, later directly taking over operations, as it grows more powerful and the US more oppressed.
Meanwhile the nonsense decorative English that appears on t-shirts and other casual paraphernalia in China is discovered to contain the code Isham needs to break free of his enslavement in the fissure between time and space and return to the present. Cracking a code that defies any known logic requires not deciphering it but deriving an original theory to explain it. With a crash course on semiotics he begins to penetrate the code but not in time to avoid being hurled to the endgame, a future America of horror, now a slave colony, and with no way out.
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About Isham Cook
I am an American writer based in China, where I have lived on and off for the past 17 years. Formerly a teacher of literature, Shakespeare, the history of the English language, linguistics, pragmatics, critical discourse analysis, semiotics and critical theory, I finally came back full circle to my true love and vocation: literature. But instead of teaching it, I have decided I can do a better job at creating it and am henceforth devoting my career to the novel (literary, speculative, satirical, dystopian) and the essay. And by “essay” I mean the essay as opposed to the “article”; the essay proper suits me because it fails to fit into preconceived categories but is by its very nature disturbing to those who seek to be reassured by the conventional pieties of the article.
My writing philosophy. “Literary fiction” is a broad and ambiguous category, but in the realm of contemporary publishing it is increasingly being defined in the narrowest of terms – “upmarket,” “high concept,” “with commercial appeal” being typical catchwords. These criteria indicate a compromise between literary fiction and genre fiction: “literary” with mass market prospects and therefore adhering to certain formulaic constraints geared to profitability (the first page that “grabs” you, the compelling storyline, heart-wrenching sympathetic characters, and the like). I would describe my writing, by contrast, as downmarket (as in downstage), big concept and with discriminating appeal. While I seek to cultivate an original voice, Ballard, Beckett, Borges, Dick, Kafka, Hesse, Melville, Mishima and Sade are influences.
