Author Luke O’Neil will read passages from his brutal new book Welcome to Hell World, a text that starkly explores grim current events in the United States.

If you don’t know Luke O’Neil’s words, prepare to be freshly bummed out by the state of daily political life in the United States. O’Neil writes long, meandering essays analyzing and critiquing timely topics like healthcare, fascism, and the corrosive effect of Fox News in his newsletter, Welcome to Hell World: Dispatches From the New American Dystopia, which he recently turned into a book of the same name, now available from OR Books. He will be reading passages from the nearly 600-page tome for the PageTurners reading series this coming week in Downtown Brooklyn.

O’Neil’s writing is full of indictments of people in power, and by way of disclosure, I was proud to overlap with him at Esquire a few years back. In his newsletter and in his book, O’Neil treats current events as a sort of literary post-apocalypse. Sample essay titles include “I would want to drink their blood” (about the deaths of children in Iraq) and “Give us the money or we’ll kill your son” (an interview with a young man who from El Salvador who fled MS-13). Despite the brutal rhetorical approach, O’Neil’s writing is both humane and full of humans — real people whose lives are torn apart by bad policy. And ultimately his words help us see the grim realities around us a little more clearly. The reading is free, but seating is limited, so get there early.

When: Monday, November 4, 7-9 pm
Where: DeKalb Market Hall (445 Albee Square W, Downtown Brooklyn)

Read the full event posting here.

An extract from Luke O’Neil’s Welcome To Hellworld

There’s a girl I never want to let myself forget. Her name is Samar Hassan and we killed her family.

In January of 2005 in the northern Iraqi town of Tal Afar, Samar who was five years old at the time was riding in the backseat of her parents’ car as they returned from bringing her young brother to the hospital. It was getting dark and nearing curfew and her father likely aware of this was driving faster than normal. Fearing that the driver was a suicide bomber an army patrol in the area that evening was given permission to open fire and so they did because that is what army patrols do.

Read the full extract here.

An extract from Luke O’Neil’s Welcome To Hellworld

Jackie Crow lost one hundred pounds and she’s very proud of that fact and why wouldn’t she be that’s almost an entire adult human being that she doesn’t need to carry around with her anymore. If you lived for years with a one-hundred-pound person riding around on your back and then one day they got off like ok I’m done with the piggyback ride now you’d be elated. Imagine how much more lightly you could step.

Read the full extract here.