Wormhole Society
By Francis Levy
Cogito (May 2025)
About The Project
“Francis Levy has an unhampered, endearingly maverick imagination as if Donald Barthelme had met up with Maimonides and, together, they decided to write about the world as it appeared to them. These deceptively simple and parable-like stories are full of wily pleasures and irreverent wisdom bout everything from the failure of insight to make anything happen, to the subtle gratifications of friendship, to the tragicomedy of eros.”
— Daphne Merkin, author of This Close to Happy and 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love
About the Book
Rusty is an East Village reprobate reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov. When he steps into a portal—the sandwich
board outside his favorite Mexican restaurant—he discovers a multiverse inhabited by endless iterations of himself. Rusty “worms” himself into varied worlds, including King Arthur's court and even the Big Bang, as he struggles with seeking redemption or sinking deeper into his own degradation. Nietzsche's “Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence” and “The Infinite Monkey Theorem” both drive the narrative.
The Wormhole Society puts the American obsession with resurrection and salvation under the microscope. Medical charlatans offer cure-alls for erectile dysfunction and a host of other ailments with plans that produce credit card-style rewards points. Hucksters with biblical stories of revelation and reform populate the twelve-step program to which the novel's title alludes.
The Wormhole Society is a satiric examination of both time travel and the fantasies of utopia that infuse science fiction literature.
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About the Authors
Francis Levy
Francis Levy is the author of the short fiction collection The Kafka Studies Department and the novels Erotomania: A Romance, Seven Days in Rio, and Tombstone: Not a Western. His criticism, short stories, interviews, and satire have appeared in The New York Times, The East Hampton Star, The New Republic, The Washington Post, The Village Voice, Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and other publications.