Russell Working's satirical novel The Insurrectionist, Chicago Bullet newspaper editors renege on their promise to send reporter Ian Landquart to the Paris bureau. Instead, he is demoted to a suburban office. After quarreling with an editor, he is forced to spend his days redacting racist language from the historical archives. To salvage his career, he investigates an elephant-owning farmer who protested nonviolently on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021. But as Ian gins up an FBI probe, he learns that his progressive teenage daughter is dating the farmer's conservative, gun-owning son—ensnaring her in the case. With a Swiftian eye, Working mercilessly lampoons wokeness, modern journalism, and abusive prosecutions.



Russell Working is the Pushcart Prizewinning author of two story collections: The Irish Martyr, which garnered the University of Notre Dame's Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, and Resurrectionists, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is a two-time winner of the Hackney Award for the Novel. As a journalist, he has reported from the United States, throughout the former Soviet Union, Central and East Asia, the Middle East, and aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt. He and his wife, Nonna, have two sons.