NAMED A TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES: “riveting and darkly funny and in all sense of the word, unclassifiable.”

“The arc of Howley’s extraordinary book feels both startling and inevitable.” —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times

“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.” —Peter C. Baker, The New Yorker

“…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

“…one of the most brilliant books I’ve read in a very long time. Just amazing writing.” —Jeff VanderMeer, NYT bestselling author of Annihilation

“… a gut check, chin check, pancreas check for writers and humans. How the fuck did you make this?” —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

“A taut and riveting tour behind the curtain of an America that is unknown to us, but in which we all live: the surveillance state. 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