Bring the Jubilee

Before Philip K. Dick, before Philip Roth's *The Plot Against America*, there was Ward Moore's daring 1953 thought experiment: what if the South had won the Civil War? The result isn't the Confederate triumph you might expect, but something far stranger and more unsettling. Hodge Backmaker, a restless bookworm from rural Virginia, leaves his family in 1938 to seek his fortune in a United States that lost the War for Southron Independence over seventy years ago. What he finds is an inverted America: the Confederate States bloom with industry and education while the former Union wallows in poverty and stagnation. In New York, Hodge stumbles into a web of underground resistance, then into Haggershaven, a communal haven for intellectuals where ideas might actually change the world. Moore's brilliance lies in his inversion, in showing how victory and defeat hinge on which side of the border you stand. A compact, provocative meditation on nationalism, progress, and the stories nations tell themselves.