A wickedly funny dystopian satire set in a financially apocalyptic future America from the critically acclaimed author of TRIBURBIA

 THE SUBPRIMES
by Karl Taro Greenfeld
Harper, May 2015

A distant future. You are your credit score. A Tea Party equivalent has won and its agenda of rapacious, unfettered, totally deregulated capitalism has resulted in a new class of Americans: Subprimes. These people have walked out on mortgages, been foreclosed upon or can no longer afford a fixed address. Their credit ratings make them unemployable. They are fugitives who keep moving to avoid arrest.

We follow a Subprime family as it is forced to travel from West to East in search of work and food. A writer and his family, better off but still struggling in this economic meltdown also attempt to hold their lives together until they too end up joining this pilgrimage. They find a small settlement of Subprimes who are making a go of an agrarian utopia built on a foreclosed exurb, until that is also targeted by job creators for shale oil extraction.

Finally a hero emerges, a woman on a motorcycle (suspiciously lacking a credit score), who just may save the world…

Karl Taro Greenfeld is the author of six previous books: the much-acclaimed novel TRIBURBIA; the memoir BOY ALONE; NOWTRENDS; CHINA SYNDROME; STANDARD DEVIATIONS and SPEED TRIBES. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, the Paris Review, Playboy, One Story, Bloomberg Businessweek, Time, Sports Illustrated, GQ, the New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Best American Short Stories 2009 and 2013, and The PEN/O.
Born in Kobe, Japan, he has lived in Paris, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, and currently lives in California. His critically acclaimed novel TRIBURBIA sold overseas in Denmark, France, Poland, Taiwan and the UK.