Off the X

The author, a veteran war correspondent, bureau chief and prize-winning reporter and editor with The New York Times and others, has called his new novel “asymmetric journalism” --- a new and original genre that melds real-time reporting with literary fiction.

A bright and privileged young American, Micah Ford, has been battered by the great tragedies of modern America. He loses his mother, a nurse, to AIDS. His father is killed on 9/11, and a grandfather dies in Katrina. A girlfriend is murdered in a hate-crime in the Deep South. Micah’s biography overlaps his country’ They’re both suffering from post-traumatic stress. Both are squarely “on the X.”

After enlisting in the Army, he begins to discover a new clarity, nothing less than a new life, through the extreme violence he encounters during a secret mission against ISIS in Iraq. Torture, love, betrayal, a miracle or two, luck, American swagger, Islamist brutality, and a final compass-reading from valor --- it’s all in here. It's a new kind of hyper-real journalistic fiction that one reviewer found “alarming, poignant and nothing short of brilliant.”

Another critic called it “war porn, or war smut, something akin to pictures of flag-draped coffins returning colorful and descriptive, but also prurient.” Ramparts said McDonald "speaks in our voice, American, and he deploys our language with all its poetry, cussedness and rough angles." The Little Review said Off the X is "a stick of dynamite. It should come with a fuse attached."