All right, welcome listeners to episode 99 of Know Your Enemy.

I'm Matt Sitman, your podcast co-host, and I'm here as always with my great friend Sam

at the bell.

Hey Sam, hi Matt.

This is a good one.

It's a good one.

And a little different too, which is nice.

We've been heavy on the politics, and this episode is about politics too,

but it's approaching it from a slightly different angle,

which is fiction, the novel novel and in particular a great

recent novel from our great friend Vincent Cunningham titled great

expectations. Yeah it was really really fun we love Vincent he's a great critic and a great novelist. This is his first novel.

For listeners who are wondering what this has to do with Know Your Enemy.

Vincent's novel is the story of a young man, a young black man, who is kind of thrust

into Obama's 2008 campaign for president.

And it's a sort of coming of age story about this young man who resembles Vincent in many respects,

but is not exactly Vincent finding himself in relation to this kind of great historical event that's going on and in relation to the candidate

Barack Obama in the story. That's pretty much all you need to know about the book

because it really follows the contours of the beginnings of an election campaign, the kind of rising

action of him starting to win, and then it really ends with Obama's inauguration.

So everything else we can fill in in the course of the episode.

Yes, as the novel's promotional copy put it, a historic presidential campaign changes the

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