American author Armen Melikyan’s Debut Novel Released

Journey to Virginland: Epistle I, the debut novel by the American author of Armenian origin Armen Melikian, has just been released in hardcover edition and is available at Barnes & Noble bookstores in the United States and several major booksellers worldwide, announced Emily Weiss at Two Harbors Press.

Set in the fictional yet all too recognizable Republic of Virginland, Melikian’s novel tells the story of Dog, the impish antihero who distills his personal odyssey of self-discovery into a formidable, eminently cogent critique of our time’s breakneck paradigm shifts.

An unapologetic creature of the street, endowed with near-encyclopedic knowledge and a bona fide bastard’s ruthless wit, Dog parses the monolith of collective hallucination by laying bare the mortally shoddy building blocks and constructs of national tradition, social mores, and cultural positioning as well as the untouchable dogmas which cement them.

As he proceeds to expose the sacred cows ensconced in various tiers of the societal pecking order, Dog intersperses his critique with a personal quest for meaning and identity which takes him from Virginland, his spiritual ground zero, to the farthest reaches of the Western world and back again, through rumination and flashback. Dog populates the journey with an evolving procession of loves, sexual liaisons, run-ins with officialdom, and face-offs with gatekeepers of culture, institutionally sanctioned literature in particular.

Journey to Virginland has already earned international critical acclaim. In his review of the novel, Paul McCarthy, a New York Times bestselling author and professor of literature at the University of Ulster, Ireland, writes: “In the best sense, I’m reminded of George Orwell’s classics, and other authors of similar stature, though there is no true parallel possible with a novel as unique in concept and execution as Journey to Virginland.”

McCarthy continues: “In this extraordinary book, there is so much originality in every way, and so many levels and depths of meaning, theme, narrative, etc., that I had to keep slowing my pace, until I could read and ‘inhale’ each word.”