Expraedium

Religious leaders on the international stage have condemned this book as a venomous poison and the handiwork of the Antichrist, while its author calls it anti-literature. Even before its first release, Armen Melikian drew both praise and death threats, along with questioning by authorities and efforts to censor and suppress the work. The book is an inflammatory, high-energy blend of satire and philosophy, part polemic and part prophecy, that takes aim at religion, national identity, economics, gender, social customs and, above all, the structure of language itself.

The narrator, Brathki, is a dispossessed and politically divided figure who travels through the broken social, national and cultural layers of his world, recording his pointed, sharp-tongued observations along the way. His voice swings between bitter and oracular. Critics have described his remarks as both heartbreaking and diabolical, and as brutally raw and painfully candid.

Melikian sets aside the conventions of the traditional novel in favor of experimentation and a fervent, letter-like form. The result is a fierce indictment of the canon of Western civilization.

Brathki's voice is by turns inspiring and infuriating, damning and hilariously funny, fragmented yet perceptive. It is meant to show the outer limits of what it means to be human, and the author presents it as carrying consequences for civilization as a whole.