This is not a book you “agree with,” but one you endure. Mark Fisher cited it as one of the most important works of writing ever created.

Framed as a “theory-fiction,” the book treats the Middle East not as territory but as an active material intelligence: one that thinks, navigates, and corrodes human history. This medusa of theory, fiction, geopolitics, and horror—written as if philosophy had been contaminated by oil, dust, war, and myth, is said to be controversial but really is just hard for just anyone to singularly comprehend or distill.

Negarestani collapses distinctions between narrative and analysis, pulling together petro-politics, Lovecraft, ancient myth, and speculative realism into a text that behaves less like an argument and more like a deliberate implication of the reader, an incantation of sorts.

Cult, difficult, and unsteady. Good luck.