DON QUIXOTE OF LA MANCHA, CALIFORNIA
A Novel of Delusion, Algorithms, and Windmills

Gentle reader, you hold in your hands a story about a man who read too much — not books of chivalry, as in the old days, but something far more dangerous in this age of infinite content: the internet.

Don Donald Quixón, fifty-year-old product manager, three-monitor home office, mortgage that terrifies him, is a man who has attended too many standups and watched too many YouTube series about the decline of Western civilization. When he has his vision — that the world is broken and someone must act — he emails his boss, deletes Slack, orders an electric scooter on Amazon Prime (same-day delivery), and rides forth into the endless sprawl of Southern California in search of injustice to correct.

His squire is Sancho Panza-Lopez, found at the taco stand on Calle Rocinante Avenue, recruited with the promise of a podcast network. His lady is Dulcinea of the DMs — a UX researcher in Culver City who has completely forgotten his name. His enemies are surveillance windmills, algorithmic oppression, a Tesla on Autopilot, and a Costco parking enforcement officer who did not wish to be liberated.

What makes this novel extraordinary is what it shares with its 400-year-old source material: beneath every perfectly observed comic set piece — the 27-tweet thread that gets fourteen likes, the poll where 44 people vote "wrong," the encounter with a parking lot influencer named "Aquilus the Resolute" — beats a genuinely moving meditation on loneliness, the search for meaning, and the thin, important line between delusion and purpose.

In a Motel 6 in San Bernardino, staring at his suspended alternate accounts, Don Quixón asks the question Cervantes asked in a different century: is the feeling of wrongness worse than the feeling of doing nothing at all?

Hilarious, heartfelt, and uncomfortably timely — one of the great satirical novels of the internet age.