Kris Saknussemm is a novelist and a multimedia artist. He has published ten books including Zanesville, Sea Monkeys, and Private Midnight. As a short story writer he has won First Prize in the Boston Review and River Styx Short Fiction Contests, and received the Fiction Collective 2 Award for Innovative Writing, in addition to publishing in a wide range of journals such as Opium Magazine, Hotel Amerika, The New England Review, The Hudson Review, Gargoyle and so on and so on. Kris is a worldly type who recently returned to the United States and we discuss his culture shock, the decline of the US, the rise of Trump and the liberal response.

Thanks goes out to members of the Zero Books Club. Zero Books Club members receive access to the Inside Zero Books which sometimes consists of unedited or full length interviews from the Zero Squared podcast, sometimes features conversations with Zero Books readers about the state of the left, and sometimes features public lectures from Zero Books authors or staff.

The music you’re listening to right now is Rhapsody in Blue performed by Paul Whiteman and George Gershwin and recorded on a cylinder. Thanks goes out to the internet archive.