Devil Take It

The Devil Comes to Washington D.C. in this ironic moral fable. Written in the grand satirical tradition of Mark Twain, this is a devilishly funny tale filled with absurd twists and surprising revelations.

“Devil Take It reads like Rabelais pulling a Tocqueville on the Trump years—it’s that good, that wild, that incandescently honest. Nossiter is as demented as he is brilliant, writing one of the funniest books I’ve read in years.”

“The devil is very much in the details of this acute satire of the vagaries of culture and the evolving norms of our times. With a truly Faustian bargain hanging in the balance, Daniel Nossiter’s unlikely protagonist leads us through a very funny, ever more existential few days of life, politics, journalism, epistemology and perhaps love in the nation’s capitol.”

Set in Trump’s Washington, Devil Take It is an ironic moral fable and an uproarious newspaper and political satire anchored in the current moment, yet timeless in its diction and humanity.

Satan visits Washington as Dr. Grippin Fall, a psychiatrist. He diagnoses Eustace Bogges, editor of the letters page of the Washington Oracle, with a condition he calls mortality. Over the course of his therapy, Bogges learns the infernal view of humankind’s history from Adam and Eve to the present, as the Devil tempts him with an irreverent gospel of laughter and mirth, whose messiah is the 16th-century French writer François Rabelais. Meanwhile, Bogges mischievously contributes a pseudonymous letter to his own page suggesting that we’d be a hell of a lot better off if everybody would simply mind their own business.

To Bogges’s astonishment and dismay, the slogan seizes the imagination of all of Washington’s inhabitants. Trump, too, embraces the notion but for his own political and financial gain, unleashing a final spasm of civil anarchy that brings history to a halt.

Written in the grand satirical tradition of Mark Twain, Mikhail Bulgakov, and John Kennedy Toole, this is a devilishly funny tale filled with absurd twists and surprising revelations.

• | Author: Daniel Debs Nossiter
• | Publisher: The Mercier Press
• | Publication Date: Sep 26, 2025
• | Number of Pages:
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• | Binding: Paperback / softback
• | ISBN-13: 9781917453554
• | ISBN-10: 1917453558