Journey to Virginland: a Groundbreaking American Novel Blazes a New Trail, With Intimations of Beckett's Waiting for Godot

LOS ANGELES, September 17, 2010 - Dog vs. God. The central themes of Samuel Beckett's iconic Waiting for
Godot find powerful resonance in Journey to Virginland, a newly published
novel of ideas by American author Armen Melikian. Dog, Melikian's antihero
and a modern-day Diogenes, is a singular character in the history of
literature, even though it evinces a dramatic concordance with Beckett's dog,
Lucky. While Waiting for Godot and Journey to Virginland are dissimilar in
style, tone, and narrative context, they both register an intellectual and
spiritual jolt in that they astutely capture the spirit of their time as they
advance a fierce critique of the modern status quo.

Waiting for Godot (1952) is considered one of the greatest
English-language plays of the 20th century and a seminal work in the Theater
of the Absurd. In Beckett's inimitably deadpan and minimalist style, the play
encapsulates the sense of alienation, ennui, and collapse of absolute values.

Journey to Virginland draws the reader into a maelstrom of experiences of
the absurd, suggesting that the absurd is a non-event. It is a state of mind
that manifests within a larger relativistic universe, and the existentialist
fixation on it as an absolute human condition incapacitating the possibility
of meaning - thus ushering in the death of philosophy - is nothing but
sophistry.

Melikian gives the topics broached in Waiting for Godot a much broader
context, framing his novel in terms of a global paradigm marked by
geopolitical and economic imperialism, unfettered social inequity, corporate
malfeasance, and the imperious ambitions of organized religion. Melikian
demonstrates that these historic patterns increasingly breed cynicism and
despair among the marginalized and disenfranchised, making way for the
existential void of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

Paul McCarthy, New York Times bestselling author and a professor of
literature at the University of Ulster, Ireland, whose career has comprised
key posts at the largest publishing houses in the world, writes of Melikian's
work: "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."

Set for general release in late 2010, Journey to Virginland is currently
available in limited quantities at www.JourneyToVirginland.com

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    Armen Melikian
    https://profnet.prnewswire.com/Subscriber/ExpertProfile.aspx?ei=97215

Rosette Miller, publicity at JourneyToVirginland.com, for Armen Melikian