Matt Weir is a writer from Naperville, Illinois.
A new book satirizes contemporary America with the tale of a struggling gun store that rebrands to fight opioid addiction. Its successful portrait of precarity and catastrophe contrasts with its sidestepping of gun stores’ inherently political nature.
A newly translated best-selling Japanese crime novel set in the 1990s fictionalizes the real-life kidnapping of a candy company CEO. It’s as comprehensive a critique of postwar Japanese society as can fit in a mystery-genre story.
One hundred years ago, Sinclair Lewis’s satirical novel Babbitt skewered 20th-century America’s booming midsize city and the complacency and conformity of its middle-class inhabitants.