"Call it America. Vast the tumble-rocket-particle-wave shows the world in a rush to arrive depart and become and forget and remember everything all at once. Call it history. Call it time and memory the way water is the measure of the clock your bones the measure of love. I mean everything passes. I said the earth is a sentry, everything passes and nothing escapes. Call it home; call it exile in a kingdom of rain." The first novel in an upcoming trilogy, "Empire Burlesque" is an attempt at reaching a realism with modernity, at finding a continuity in fractured timelines and significance in chaos in a world in which these very things--realism, continuity and significance--have been deconstructed and possibly destroyed. In this "Empire Burlesque" of modernity, many things occur in the novel (life) with no apparent significance until embued with meaning by the subject (us) and narrative authority (authority) itself is assailed by arbitrary, chaotic and decentralizing forces. This means the plot (political framing) to the extent one exists, may be ignored or contradicted and information might arrive to intrude into the narrative for no apparent reason and with no obvious connection to the events in the story. Welcome to a modern, schizoid, fragmented, unhinged burlesque empire where Trumpian characters define reality and distort reason. An existential detective story with Theseus and the Minotaur as characters, taking on the many forms of man versus beast, citizen versus state, liberty versus control, "Empire Burlesque" renders our modernity with all its farcical, Faustian fog.