Skyscraper Heavens

About the Book

Khalid, our narrator, and his two cousins, Jahan and Jaleh, comment on the record of a historic revolution they are busy researching via live lessons and recorded discs. Skyscraper Heavens weaves the dialogue of the characters, which include Zareen, Khalid’s wife, around the backdrop of a largely chronological summation of a revolution in the fictional Middle Eastern country of Baug. The retelling of the events of the revolution and the characters’ responses to it touch on Marcusian themes of opposition and containment. The juxtaposition of timelines and the live and prerecorded study sessions in which the characters participate form a motif for the reader, a mosaic of the dialectic.

About the Author

John Rubens was born in San Francisco and grew up in San Mateo County, California, just south of the city. He is a graduate of the University of California at San Diego and Santa Clara University School of Law, and he learned French during his eighteen months of scholarship in Strasbourg, France. While practicing law in Hollywood, California, in 1995, John met his wife, Lucia, and they have made a home together there since 1998. Skyscraper Heavens began as a work of nonfiction told to the author while still an undergraduate at UC San Diego. Over the next thirty-five years, it was stored, rewritten, and is now presented as an antinovel. The work is set in Baug, a fictional Middle Eastern country inhabited by fictional characters who struggle coming to terms with a national revolution, its causes, and implications.