KERRY HOWLEY is a feature writer at New York magazine and the author of Thrown, a New York Times Editors' Choice and pick for best-of-the-year lists in Time, Salon, Slate, and many other venues. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Best American Sportswriting, The New York Times Magazine, and Harper's. A Lannan Foundation Fellow, she holds an MFA from the University of Iowa, where she was a professor at the celebrated Nonfiction Writing Program until joining New York. She lives in Los Angeles.
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity
Fair, The New Republic
“An odyssey through the post-9/11 American security state… Howley’s
prose reminded me of Don DeLillo’s, not just in its preternatural
attunement to invisible currents of feeling which course between
varied pockets of the globalized American project, but also in the
feeling that she’d taken her experience of the world and melted it
down into a weapon meant to puncture our hardened habits of
perception… Bottoms Up restores the world to something akin to its
original strangeness. It’s a daring approach, and an invaluable
one: seeing the world anew makes it feel, in some small way, up for
grabs, and this feeling is a precondition for real thought.”
—Peter C. Baker, The New Yorker
“Riveting and darkly funny and, in all senses of the word,
unclassifiable. Howley writes about privacy and its absence; about
hiding and leaking and secrets and betrayal. But she also writes
about the strange experience of living, and how it gets flattened
and codified into data that can be turned into portraits of static,
permanent beings — creatures who would be unrecognizable to
ourselves… The arc of Howley’s extraordinary book feels both
startling and inevitable; of course a journey through the deep
state would send her down the rabbit hole… We become ourselves by
shedding our past selves — but now those discarded selves are
recorded somewhere, potentially living longer than we do. In her
acknowledgments, Howley ends with a note to her children that could
serve as a blessing for us all: ‘May you be only as remembered as
you wish.’”
—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
"When whistleblower Reality Winner was arrested in 2017
and later pleaded guilty to sending classified documents to The
Intercept, it was a story with huge relevance to the group of
activists and journalists with interests in the security state and
its overreaches, but it didn’t easily translate to the broader
public... Kerry Howley draws an intimate portrait of the
woman, her world, and her motivations with literary flair and a wry
voice.... Most attempts to understand the war on terror leave a
reader with more questions and moral confusion than they began
with. In approaching that lack of stability with intellect and keen
aesthetics, Howley’s book leaves a reader immeasurably
enriched."
—Vanity Fair
"At 25, [Reality] Winner—yoga teacher, beloved sister, AR-15
owner—was sentenced to five years in prison for leaking classified
documents about a Russian election attack. Howley deftly analyzes
the brutal, surreal conditions that underlie this drama and the way
that they implicate all of us, even if surveillance of our phones
would mostly reveal repeated visits to WebMD and Reformation. This
is the kind of book you wind up holding open to read even as you
brush your teeth, eat breakfast, and try to walk the dog."
—Glamour
“So well-written, vivid, and empathetic that it could honestly have
been about anything and I would have devoured it.”
—Olga Khazan, The Atlantic
“What appeals about Howley’s book is precisely her taste for the
anecdote that won’t quite fit, the historical person who won’t
settle down and become a consistently admirable character, the way
real-life events can seem both plotted and chaotic. She seeks forms
that will honor the opaque quality of real people and real events,
and that remind us of the shaping, the fictionalizing, that has to
accompany any statement of truth.”
—Phil Christman, The Bulwark
"The travails of Reality Winner, aspiring whistleblower in over her
head, make a fantastic story. But there is no better way to tell it
than through the cracked lens of Kerry Howley’s inimitable prose.
Sly and sidling, Howley’s trip through the deep state’s wires is
off-kilter and often funny as she drags you to the realization that
there is no such thing as a private life anymore."
—Jason Linkins, The New Republic
"Kerry Howley been scary good at making art. But this one here,
it's a gut check, chin check, pancreas check for writers and
humans. How the f**k did you make this?”
—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy
"Bottoms Up is magnificent. I neglected my family through much of
the holidays to finish it."
—Sara Quin, musician and New York Times bestselling co-author of
High School
"A taut and riveting tour behind the curtain of an America that is
unknown to us, but in which we all live. Kerry Howley is an astute,
funny, contemplative, and relentless guide whose eye misses
nothing. I would follow her anywhere."
—Melissa Febos, bestselling author of Girlhood and Body Work
“I love this book because I can't quite describe what it
is. It bristles with the precise kind of
strangeness that we live in but cannot name. Howley is one of
the very best nonfiction writers working today and she is in peak
form here. I'm jealous of her prose.”
—Chris Hayes, bestselling author of A Colony in a Nation
"This is a work of profound moral and political importance, and an
exhilarating evolution of an art form by one of our great
contemporary writers. Howley meditates on freedom, privacy,
storytelling, and the state, carefully following the threads of the
War on Terror to the political upheavals of the present day. Not
only is Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs a necessary expansion and
corrective to established narratives of decades of
American overreach and cruelty, it is a beautiful, stylish,
nuanced, and empathetic work of art, unlike any I've read
before."
—Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State
“Kerry Howley sees it all. You may want to believe that the digital
age has remade surveillance into a distant abstraction—all-seeing
but also objective, supra-human, impersonal. Bottoms Up and the
Devil Laughs is an unsparing map of that delusion, and of the
sticky human spiderweb — nodes and eyeballs, informants, and
subjects — in which we all now live, complicitly. A generational
subject now has its generational masterwork.”
—David Wallace-Wells, bestselling author of The Uninhabitable
Earth
"Bottoms Up and The Devil Laughs is the book Joan Didion would have
produced if Didion chose to delve into the motivations,
circumstances, passions, absurdities and persecutions of 'national
security' whistleblowers and other people on the margins of the War
on Terror. Howley chronicles a widespread, insidious social
derangement, but never for a moment treats her characters as
anything other than fully realized human beings... Still, the heart
of the book is the story of Reality Winner, and I doubt anyone
will ever tell it better than Howley does."
—Spencer Ackerman, author of Reign of Terror
"In this fascinating dispatch from the height of the surveillance
age, Howley (Thrown) expands on her New York magazine profile of
Reality Winner, the intelligence specialist who leaked classified
reports on Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential
election... Based on extensive interviews with Winner, her family,
and her friends, and enriched by incisive character sketches of
Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and other whistleblowers, Howley
reveals how the gravest threat to the national security state has
become ‘ideological, morally serious twentysomethings finding
themselves as they sifted through secrets their younger selves had
promised to keep.’ Witty, humane, and fiercely intelligent, this is
a striking critique of a world intent on 'burying itself' in
information."
—Publishers Weekly, starred
"Howley manages to push beyond partisan hack work to lay bare the
flaws or biases in everyone’s read on Reality [Winner]—be it the
right or left, the Intercept or NSA, Winner’s family, her lawyers,
or her prosecutors. She illustrates the ways in which the raw
data of someone’s life can be culled into a story they didn’t know
they had told... Howley’s capacity for incisive empathy
extends to those whom most would dismiss as kooks. Just as
narrators who purport to be reliable can be wrong, she suggests,
those whom we write off as unreliable can, on some level, be
right."
—Tarpley Hitt, BookForum
"A provocative look at the culture of intelligence and its
subversions."
—Kirkus
"In this wide-ranging, often chilling survey, Howley meditates on
the ways in which data collected by U.S. government agencies can be
used to invade and destroy the lives of citizens... Howley
makes a convincing argument that Winner was convicted less for the
leak than for misleading evidence from old social media posts and
personal texts... and suggests that we all might be subject to
danger from the same sort of posts, preserved without our knowledge
in government databases."
—Booklist
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