Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State -- Kerry Howley, Hardcover

A wild, humane, and hilarious meditation on post-privacy America--from the acclaimed author of Thrown

"Howley meditates on freedom, privacy, storytelling, and the state, carefully following the threads of the War on Terror to the political upheavals of the present day...A beautiful, stylish, nuanced, and empathetic work of art, unlike any I've read before."--Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State

Who are you? You are data about data. You are a map of connections--a culmination of everything you have ever posted, searched, emailed, liked, and followed. In this groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction, Kerry Howley investigates the curious implications of living in the age of the indelible. Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs tells the true story of intelligence specialist Reality Winner, a lone young woman who stuffs a state secret under her skirt and trusts the wrong people to help. After printing five pages of dangerous information she was never supposed to see, Winner finds herself at the mercy of forces more invasive than she could have possibly imagined.

Following Winner's unlikely journey from rural Texas to a federal courtroom, Howley maps a hidden world, drawing in John Walker Lindh, Lady Gaga, Edward Snowden, a rescue dog named Outlaw Babyface Nelson, and a mother who will do whatever it takes to get her daughter out of jail. Howley's subjects face a challenge new to history: they are imprisoned by their past selves, trapped for as long as the Internet endures. A soap opera set in the deep state, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs is a free fall into a world where everything is recorded and nothing is sacred, from a singular writer unafraid to ask essential questions about the strangeness of modern life.

Author: Kerry Howley
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Published: 03/21/2023
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.94lbs
Size: 8.51h x 5.83w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9780525655497

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 10/01/2022 pg. 14
Kirkus Reviews 01/15/2023
Publishers Weekly 01/16/2023
Booklist 02/15/2023 pg. 5

About the Author
KERRY HOWLEY is a feature writer at New York magazine and the author of Thrown, a New York Times Editors' Choice and pick for best-of-the-year lists in Time, Salon, Slate, and many other venues. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Best American Sportswriting, The New York Times Magazine, and Harper's. A Lannan Foundation Fellow, she holds an MFA from the University of Iowa, where she was a professor at the celebrated Nonfiction Writing Program until joining New York. She lives in Los Angeles.