Melville House says:

Although numerous independent booksellers, over the last few weeks, have individually announced they would ban books published by Amazon from their stores, late yesterday the trade organization representing most of the indies in the U.S. as well as many in Canada made it official: The American Booksellers Association (ABA) announced it would be joining competitors Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, and Chapters Indigo in boycotting Amazon’s books.

This means it's virtually impossible to buy any of Amazon's print books in any brick-and-mortar bookstore in the United States. That's an impressive blockade. While Amazon is by far the biggest bookseller in the United States, it does mean that there's a significant chunk of the book-buying public that doesn't have access to their titles.

The premise of Matt Ruff's new novel probably could have gotten him arrested back in the panicked, paranoid days of 2002. The Mirage (Harper, $25.99) imagines a world where the dominant power is the United Arab States. After Christian fundamentalists topple the Tigris & Euphrates World Trade Towers in Baghdad on 11/9/2001, troops from the UAS flood into the fractured nations of North America to find weapons of mass destruction that may or may not exist. The invasion is highly controversial, and by 2009, the UAS is torn between citizens who support isolationism and more hawkish forces—including beloved Senator Osama bin Laden—who want to see Christianity utterly destroyed. At the same time, Muslims are becoming more lax in their worship and social mores (many people don't even stop their busy workdays to respond to the five calls to prayer that sound around the city), and angry fundamentalists complain that the UAS's necessary religious roots are withering away.

Ruff, a local writer, embraces this twisty concept with an attention to detail that suggests many months, more likely years, of fervent research. He imagines the life of a federal agent named Mustafa al Baghdadi, who, in the patriotic days after 11/9, shifts his focus from arresting smugglers of illegal alcohol to the more serious field of Arab Homeland Security. Al Baghdadi uncovers a plot that stretches from the highest powers in the UAS all the way down to the scuzziest crime lord in Baghdad—a small-time loser with airs of grandeur named Saddam Hussein. Along the way, al Baghdadi discovers artifacts (mostly paper items, including the front page of a nonexistent newspaper called the New York Times announcing the destruction of a twinned pair of nonexistent skyscrapers in New York City) that suggest there is another world out there where the script has been flipped...

(Keep reading.)

I just wish Hyman told this story with a little more skill. As a narrative, Borrow is weighted down with clunky language and a broken structure. We hear the same pieces of information again and again, each time framed as though we were hearing it for the first time. Certain explanations aren't clear enough for readers—like myself—who have a hard time understanding complicated financial matters. As a concept for a book, it's great. As a piece of writing, it's unfortunate.

If you're interested in the concept of debt as a player in the history of humanity, I'd like to again turn your attention to David Graeber's book Debt, which Charles Mudede writes about in this week's books lead. It's wider in scope than Borrow, and a lot more forceful in its opinions. And it's a better piece of writing, besides. Something that publishers of non-fiction need to remember is that the quality of language in a piece matters; Borrow feels like a lashed-together raft of ideas, and Hyman's perspective suffers because of that. Debt has been crafted as an argument and as a piece of writing, and that's why it's the book we'll be discussing ten years from now.