ProperCoochie posted:

If anybody is looking for a leftist work of fiction that's not 900 pages and is even something of a pageturner, I cannot recommend Wag the Dog by Larry Beinhart enough.

It's like the inverse Starship Troopers in that the movie is disposable, the book is essential. If you enjoy how the movie ST was rediscovered/reconsidered over the last 10 years, WtD is a perfect fit for you. You will marvel and repeatedly shake your head in awe that this was published pre-9/11. The author says in an updated forward:

That's not hyperbole, it straight up reads like an instruction manual.

The movie is about the president fabricating a war to distract from personal affairs.
The book is about how the the Gulf War was overtly staged and exaggerated and how a few Hollywood types helped George Bush design and direct it. There are many real world characters, it starts with Lee Atwater on his deathbed handing off the blueprints. There's a hardboiled detective trying to unravel it all, WtD is like a genre fiction take on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulf_War_Did_Not_Take_Place. There are many footnotes detailing real world facts and events, and at the end of the book are a long list of lingering questions.

Note: The book was originally published as American Hero. Avoid that version, as it was republished a couple years later as WtD with a couple extra chapters that recontextualizes the whole work into metafiction territory.