Winner of the William Faulkner Prize in Fiction
Fredrick Barton
In the Wake of the Flagship
Fredrick Barton’s newest work is a blistering satire chronicling one man’s battle against bureaucracy and corruption. Basketball coach Richard Janus has found himself interim rector of Urban University, a woefully underfunded public college in Choctaw, Alkansea. After Hurricane Hosea devastates the city, Janus must go to war with the unscrupulous heads of Alkansea’s flagship university, facing down massive layoffs and rabid football fans. The absurdity of the American experience is on full display here as Metacom, the legendary Indian sachem, narrates Janus’s struggle, recounting academic intrigue and hypocrisy with searing humor. Barton’s insight into human contradictions earns In the Wake of the Flagship a place beside other campus novel luminaries.
Barton has a lot of important human business on his mind in this exceptional novel: race, history, the South, hurricanes, laughter, love, and much more. IN THE WAKE OF THE FLAGSHIP is wonderfully inventive, and addictive to read.
--Richard Ford
Rick Barton's IN THE WAKE OF THE FLAGSHIP brilliantly turns the historical novel on its head. At once hilarious, thought-provoking, and ultimately tragic, this novel is an opus, the work of a writer at the peak of his powers.
--Joseph Boyden, Author of The Orenda
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