The Parade

Praise for Ben Miller

“Ben Miller’s The Parade is a breathless, wildly imaginative, dystopian romp. Think Dr. Seuss on steroids, Kerouac on a carousel, Orwell through the Looking Glass. It’s a movie in words, a kaleidoscope mural, motion in poetry. You’ll never read anything like it again.”
  —Dean King, New York Timesbestselling author of Skeletons on the Zahara

“Witty farce meets phantasmagorical nightmare, The Parade is a biting commentary on patriotism taken to its furthest extremes. Bursting with alliterative language and evocatively weird imagery…Miller’s fiction debut is eccentric and ambitious, a refreshing departure from the navel-gazing instincts that dominate modern fiction.”
–Ariadne Blayde, author of Ash Tuesday

“The Parade is a dystopian tour de force, an over-the-top epic of brainwashed mandatory patriotism run—I should say force-marched—amok.” 
—Stephen Kessler, author of The Tolstoy of the Zulus: On Culture, Arts & Letters

“A wild rollercoaster of a novel, conjuring a world populated by mindless lemmings so hopped up on patriotic celebrations that it’s become irrelevant what’s being celebrated. In The Parade, Wallace Stevens’s Emperor of Ice Cream meets the Reverend Dodgson’s Jabberwocky, in a rollicking fantasy that would be great fun were it not so close to our current reality. If you grew up loathing July 4th parades, this is the book for you. And if you are tired of parables, read this novel for the sheer pleasure of Miller’s no-holds-barred wordsmithing, relishing the ‘cluckophony’ of marching bands, the ‘dum-dum-drummers,’ the ‘Viralists in jibe boots juggling other Viralists in jive boots,’ the ‘Don’t Drizzle on Me flag umbrellas.’ As if this weren’t enough, The Parade also manages to be a moving coming-of-age story as Miller’s protagonist, practicing the great ‘Step-Off,’ quits the parade and learns to be himself.”

—Christoph Irmscher, author of The Poetics of Natural History