GAZA, WYOMING takes place in an alternate 2015. In this world, President Obama lost the 2012 election. And after the Israel-Hamas conflict of 2014, President Romney pushed through a Middle East peace plan that required the U.S. to absorb the Palestinian refugee population, outside the West Bank. They built the camps in Wyoming. With this new reality affecting the upcoming 2016 elections, one talented Democratic campaign operative – a genderqueer individual named Persia VanSlyke – uncovers a secret that could have grave consequences for hir party. The investigative path ze must pursue is populated by gruff New Gaza officials, a Patriot Act-jailed journalist, a news anchor for a .GIF-based 24-hour web-news broadcast entity, as well as an ex-citizen who has turned himself in to our growing private-prison system (in order to discharge student loan debt). One thing these characters have in common is a desire to find some way forward in an America that is liable to change faster than anyone can strategize in turn. Seth Colter Walls’s beguiling debut novel imagines an insane, American-style solution to one of mankind’s most vexing recent problems, and then follows through with novelistic rigor. With more than a shade of early Pynchon, Walls spins out an alternative vision of contemporary history that sheds some unflattering light upon our present. Inhabiting the inner workings of Beltway investigators, New York media stars, and far-flung internment camps for our international guests, Gaza, Wyoming is a book as funny as it is terrifying. If we’re not careful, we’ll soon all be living there. - Keith Gessen