Author Event! K*ll DICK by Luke Goebel with Susan Straight & Kate Gale

About the book:

"A wild plan to disrupt a big Hollywood awards show, a scheme to assassinate a medical business mogul who has made money off pain and addiction, and the ever-widening gap between the ultra wealthy and the destitute."—Molly Lambert, Los Angeles Times Reviews

A fever dream, K*ll Dick is a literary thriller that plunges into the chaos of Los Angeles, where addiction, privilege, and corruption combust.

At nineteen, Susie Vogelman should be coasting: she’s an NYU dropout with no responsibilities, endless prescription pills, and a Brentwood estate to waste away in. But Los Angeles has other plans. A string of brutal murders targeting addicts spreads through the city, and Susie’s ivory tower begins to crumble. The headlines point too close to home: her father’s ties to an opioid empire, a sinister secret society, and her own complicity in the systems holding it all together.

Then there’s Peter Holiday, a disgraced professor running a rehab scam so audacious it’s almost admirable. When their lives collide, Susie and Peter are dragged into a web of privilege, corruption, and violence, where every escape leads deeper into the rot.

Dark, satirical, and razor-sharp, K*ll Dick is a modern literary thriller that unflinchingly dissects wealth, exploitation, and the perilous line between survival and self-destruction.

About the authors:

Luke Goebel is an acclaimed author and screenwriter celebrated for his unflinching honesty and innovative storytelling. A recipient of the prestigious Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize and the Joan Scott Memorial Fiction Award, his debut novel, Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, garnered critical acclaim for its innovative and precisely lyrical, profoundly resonant exploration of love, grief, and the restless search for identity. Goebel also co-wrote Eileen, starring Anne Hathaway and McKenzie Thompson, and Causeway, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry (who received an Oscar nomination for his performance). He is known as well as his role as co-editor at The New York Tyrant and work with Tyrant Books. He lives in Pasadena, CA with his wife, fellow author Ottessa Moshfegh.

Susan Straight has published nine novels, including Mecca, A Million Nightingales, and Highwire Moon, and one memoir, In the Country of Women. She’s been a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the National Book Award, among other honors, and received the Lannan Prize, the O. Henry Award, the Edgar Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement from the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. Her fiction has been translated into ten languages. She was born in Riverside, California, where she lives with her family.

Dr. Kate Gale is co-founder and Publisher of Red Hen Press, Editor of the Los Angeles Review. She is author of several books of poetry including the The Loneliest Girl and The Goldilocks Zone from the University of New Mexico Press in 2014. She wrote the libretto Rio de Sangre, for the opera with composer Don Davis, which had its world premiere October 2010 at the Florentine Opera in Milwaukee. She has a forthcoming memoir, Little Soldiers from Zando.

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