The Insurrectionist: New Book Skewers False Jan. 6 Narrative

From Award-winning Author Russell Working, The Insurrectionist Scathingly Lampoons a Day of Reckoning- On Sale Now

The Insurrectionist, a Swiftian novel that satirizes the Biden administration’s overzealous prosecutions, is now available as we approach the anniversary of January 6. With a literary style reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor and Barry Hannah, Pushcart Prizewinner Russell Working lampoons the news media, our woke era, and government overreach in J6 prosecutions. Defying the official narrative, The Insurrectionist explores the abusive nature of politicized prosecutions.

In The Insurrectionist, a Chicago reporter seeks to salvage his career by investigating an elephant-owning farmer who protested nonviolently outside the U.S. Capitol amid the chaos of Jan. 6, 2021.

The journalist gins up an FBI probe, only to learn that his progressive teenage daughter is dating the farmer’s conservative, gun-owning son, entangling his own family in the case.

In one excerpt, Working hilariously describes the fed’s raid on the Swygert’s farm:

Ian was running on adrenaline and caffeine when he met Drew Vu in the staging ground in a vacant lot beside a megachurch a mile from the Swygerts’ farm. Like a rag on a filthy windshield, urban light pollution smeared a firmament bereft of stars and planets, suggesting the remote future of an endlessly expanding universe. The grounds seethed with exertion. Armored male- and female-presenting individuals ran everywhere like ants pouring from a crack in a sidewalk after a rainfall. SUVs, Bearcats, Strykers, and Bradley Fighting Vehicles crowded the grounds, their engines idling as if an experiment in atmospheric harm were underway.

The vehicles’ cubistic forms, the feds in black Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles kit, the flashes in the night of cigarette lighters, the whiffs of tobacco smoke—it all reminded Ian of a time in Afghanistan when he had ridden along with U.S. soldiers and several burly, mysterious civilian contractors on a mission to capture a warlord. It turned out military intelligence had sent them after the wrong man, who happened to be a U.S. ally. Overenthusiastic troops had accidentally suffocated “the friendly,” or perhaps broken his neck, when they pulled a bag over his head and dogpiled on top of him. F-15s had then been called in to waste a crowd of clansmen who attacked the ground troops. Ian trusted that the raid on the Swygerts would go better than that.

Those praising the book include Christina K, arrested at the capitol on January 6. In her review of the book on Amazon, Christina writes:

This book deliciously satirizes the January 6 experience. As one of the 1,561 arrested for the new crime of peaceful protest, I found The Insurrectionist a tender portrait that vividly captures our collective nightmare.
I loved this book and want to read it again. Only, I have an active case (hearings, motions, trial date) and don’t need more reminders of the brutality and absurdity of the situation. If you want to learn about what we’re going through, read this book!

I am awed that Mr. Working got us so well. I was moved to tears on a few occasions reading this and tears come in writing this review. However, this is a fun novel, poignant, true. It’s surreal going through this and I would have thought no one cares. Turns out Mr. Working and many others are listening and can put themselves in our shoes. It proves to me my hunch that the majority of Americans were with us that day in January and stand firmly by us today. No one deserved to be cancelled, slandered, charged, kidnapped, caged, and abused. But we were and we are. It’s been eye-opening and eye watering. This book is a true account of our bruised but unbreakable spirits.

Working has published two fiction collections: Resurrectionists, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and The Irish Martyr, which won the University of Notre Dame’s Sullivan Award. The title story of The Irish Martyr was included in Pushcart’s 2005 anthology. He has won numerous short fiction awards and twice received the $5,000 Hackney Award for the Novel. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

A freelance writer, Working is a former staff reporter for the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers. He spent over six years freelancing abroad in Russia and Cyprus. His byline has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Japan Times, The Jerusalem Post, Kyoto Journal, The Paris Review, BusinessWeek, the South China Morning Post, TriQuarterly, Zoetrope: All-Story, Crazyhorse, The Atlantic, Columbia Journalism Review, and scores of other publications worldwide.

Praise for Author Russell Working

Publisher’s Weekly praised Working’s fiction as “reminiscent of the early Paul Bowles, with the same muscular use of language, the same ability to create a mood fraught with tension.”

The New York Times commended his “amazing ability to draw the reader immediately into the world about which he is writing, whether it is the paper mills of the Pacific Northwest, where a former policeman is almost courting death, the Haiti of voodoo and the dread Tonton Macoutes, or the lazy hot summer afternoons of a group of young boys.”

Working and his wife, Nonna, were crucial in establishing the provenance of a watch that once belonged to the last emperor of China. He spent nearly a year as lead writer for the project for auction house Phillips. In 2023 the auctioneer flew the two of them to Hong Kong for the sale of the watch, which netted $6.2 million.

The book is available on Amazon.

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