ATTA by Jarett Kobek

ATTA by Jarett Kobek

A disorienting fictionalized portrayal of 9/11 mastermind Mohamed Atta and the meaning of madness.

Ours is a century of fear. Governments and mass media bombard us with words and images: desert radicals, rogue states, jihadists, WMDs, existential enemies of freedom. We labor beneath myths that neither address nor describe the present situation, monstrous deceptions produced by a sound bite society. There is no reckoning of actuality, no understanding of the individual lives that inaugurated this echo chamber.

In the summer of 1999, Mohamed Atta defended a master's thesis that critiqued the introduction of Western-style skyscrapers in the Middle East and called for the return of the Islamic-Oriental city. Using this as a departure point, Jarett Kobek's novel ATA offers a fictionalized psychedelic biography of Mohamed Atta that circles around a simple question: what if 9/11 was as much a matter of architectural criticism as religious terrorism? Following the development of a socially awkward boy into one of history's great villains, Kobek demonstrates the need for a new understanding of global terrorism. Joined in this volume by a second work, The Whitman of Tikrit--a radical reimagining of Saddam Hussein's last day before capture--ATA is a brutal, relentless, and ultimately fearless corrective to ten years of propaganda and pandering.

Jarett Kobek is a California-based Turkish-American writer. He's the author of four publications, including the novel I Hate the Internet, as well as a ZX Spectrum prequel with the same name.