New York magazine commissioned writers to contribute political fictions, short stories that use real public figures in imagined situations. In the case of Adam Haslett, the result is a strangely affecting nocturne about President Obama taking a cigarette break in Washington, D.C. in the wee hours of the morning, which runs below an equally disorienting fictional photo of Obama smoking a cigarette.
Fictionalized photograph by Alison Jackson in New York magazine.
Much to the dismay of his Secret Service bodyguards, he meets and converses with a complete stranger on a night when the President faces a momentous foreign-policy decision. Haslett, author of the story collection "You Are Not a Stranger Here," has his first novel, "Union Atlantic," coming out early in 2010. An excerpt of the novel appears in the new Esquire.
Other writers in the new New York magazine series include Mary Gaitskill on Ashley Dupre and Silda Spitzer, Heidi Julavits on George and Barbara Bush, and Paul Rudnick on Sarah Palin.
