Remy Joseph Roussetzki

When I became aware that I write because of what happened to my grandfather Joseph, I decided to use my full name: Rémy Joseph Roussetzki.

For many years, I wrote what I wanted to write alongside my academic career. My specialized essays on Rabelais and John Milton were published, I was promoted, and I remain proud of that work — even knowing that nobody reads their colleagues' papers. It is enough that you know they have been promoted.

But it was the fiction that kept pulling me back. Looking at the novels and stories I had been writing in parallel, I discovered that my work returns obsessively to a small number of questions: how intelligent people mistake fascination for truth; what sons inherit from fathers who were never quite present; and what it costs to have been a willing participant in something that went wrong. Really wrong.

My books move between Paris, New York, Lima, the Caribbean, and the South Bronx. The settings change. The questions don't. Across fiction, autofiction, and essay, I have been circling the same territory from different angles — building what I think of as a body of work rather than a series of separate books.

The novels in the Josephine diptych — A Willing Instrument and Sacrifice, Now — examine complicity and self-deception in the world of a cyberterrorist movement. Out of the Fatal Loop follows a son into the Caribbean in search of a father he barely knew, and finds the same failures repeating across three generations. The essays in The Last Freedom ask what remains of self-determination when algorithms have predicted everything else.