Manuel Gonzales is the author of The Regional Office is Under Attack! (2017), a highly inventive novel about a team of female assassins charged with combating “the amassing forces of darkness that threaten, at nearly every turn, the fate of the planet.”

 

The book explores comic book and movie tropes, and weaves them into a profound and thoughtful meditation on human nature, cherished institutions, and narrative convention. Lit Hub said, “With this debut novel, Gonzales… proves himself to be both a wonderful addition to a proud literary tradition (that of Vonnegut, Borges, Saunders, Bender, and Barthelme, et al) and a true original.”

He is also author of the collection The Miniature Wife and Other Stories, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the John Gardner Prize for Fiction. 

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Gonzales teaches creative writing and literature at Bennington College, where he is the fiction editor of the Bennington Review. He is also a contributing editor for American Short Fiction and One Story Magazine.

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Cosponsored by the English Department’s Creative Writing Program and Young Writers Project, UAlbany’s Writing & Critical Inquiry Program (WCI), and the Honors College.

from the publisher:

In a world beset by amassing forces of darkness, one organization — the Regional Office — and its coterie of super-powered female assassins protects the globe from annihilation.

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At its helm, the mysterious Oyemi and her oracles seek out new recruits and root out evil plots. Then a prophecy suggests that someone from inside might bring about its downfall. And now, the Regional Office is under attack.
 
Recruited by a defector from within, Rose is a young assassin leading the attack, eager to stretch into her powers and prove herself on her first mission. Defending the Regional Office is Sarah — who may or may not have a mechanical arm — fiercely devoted to the organization that took her in as a young woman in the wake of her mother’s sudden disappearance. On the day that the Regional Office is attacked, Rose’s and Sarah’s stories will overlap, their lives will collide, and the world as they know it just might end.
 
Weaving in a brilliantly conceived mythology, fantastical magical powers, teenage crushes, and kinetic fight scenes, The Regional Office Is Under Attack! is a seismically entertaining debut novel about revenge and allegiance and love. - Read more

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from the New York Times book review

"...The Regional Office Is Under Attack! is an entertaining and satisfying novel. Like the best of the stories it satirizes so gently, it’s rollicking good fun on the surface, action-packed and shiny in all the right places; underneath that surface, though, it’s thoughtful and well considered. Gonzales has created a superheroic fighting force of the kind we’ve grown so used to through constant exposure to the Avengers and various iterations of the X-Men, and then he has turned out their pockets and flipped open their diaries."​ - Read more