The Absolved is a thinking person’s novel. Dramatic and well written, this dystopian trip to a robotic future has everything: lust, law, medicine, betrayal, politics— even love. As humans struggle to retrieve their humanity from the robots who have taken their jobs and self worth, one man—a doctor— has the opportunity to be a hero or villain. This book will keep you up at night wondering what our future holds. 

-- Alan Dershowitz

"With touches of Vonnegut and Huxley, Matthew Binder delivers a darkly funny look at a future we’re most likely stuck with."  

-- Seth Meyers

“The Absolved shines an unapologetic spotlight on the malaise and absurdity of an America whose soul has been sucked out by an over-dependence on artificial intelligence -- a journey that feels as poignant and honest in today's world as it does in Binder's techno-dystopia.”

-- John Cunningham Ph.D., AI professor, Columbia University 

“In The Absolved, Matthew Binder has delivered us a devastating portrait of where we are imminently headed. Through his narrator Henri's fopperies, ranging from the affair to the revolution, Binder's novel is an ode to the imperfect and hilarious beauty of being human.

-- Hannah Lillith Assadi, author of Sonora (shortlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and winner of the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award in Literature)

“Dysfunction—in the father and in the patriarchy that’s to blame for most of this world’s current ills—is the theme of Matthew Binder’s novel The Absolved, and never have we seen it more brilliantly skewered or sadly portrayed. Hilarious as Vonnegut in Cat’s Cradle, terrifying as Lewis in It Can’t Happen Here, Binder offers us a parable for a future that could as well be our present, neither of which we should be proud to call our own. Eerie in its insight, lacerating in its wit, merciless in its conclusions, this is a book liable to become an instant classic. Binder points the finger in these pages, and names the names. He is an oracle for our time.” 

-- D. Foy, author of the novels Made to Break, Patricide, and Absolutely Golden (September 2017). His work has appeared in Guernica, Salon, Hazlitt, Post Road, Electric Literature, BOMB, The Literary Review, Midnight Breakfast, The Scofield, and The Georgia Review, among many others, and has been included in the books Laundromat, Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, and A Moment’s Notice.

* National consumer print, online, and broadcast media campaign *

* Author bookstore & library appearances, Fall/Winter 2018 *

* Publishing trade ARC/galley outreach *

* Author interviews and excerpts available upon request *

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