Publisher, Simon & Schuster Audioworks (January 2007)

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Seventeen-year-old Severin Boxx lives on Yokota, an enormous American Air Force base on the outskirts of Tokyo. Like most of the other young American men on the airbase, Severin is mad for Virginia Kindwall, the base general's daughter, who is a half-half American and half Japanese. Beautiful, smart, and utterly defiant of a father who wields godlike military power, Virginia has become a petty criminal in the Japanese underground that lurks in the mad neon netherworld just outside the base, around the nearby rail station's Exit A.

Severin is soon caught up in Virginia's world. But their romance is short-lived as they find themselves in trouble way over their heads and subjected to the enormous, unforgiving tensions that remain between America and Japan in the wake of World War II. Years later, Severin and Virginia remain lost to each other -- until an emotionally frayed, thirty-something Severin embarks on a quest to find Virginia, and reclaim the part of himself taken from him when his boyhood abruptly ended.

Like Jarhead before it, Anthony Swofford's Exit A is darkly irreverent, frankly erotic, and more than a little wicked, a tale told in a brooding, pained voice filled with the simple human fury of being alive.

About the Author: Anthony Swofford served in a U.S. Marine Corps Surveillance and Target Acquisition/Scout-Sniper platoon during the Gulf War. After the war, he was educated at American River College; the University of California, Davis; and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has taught at the University of Iowa and Lewis and Clark College. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, Harper's, Men's Journal, The Iowa Review, and other publications. A Michener-Copernicus Fellowship recipient, he lives in New York.

About the Performer: John Slattery has starred on Broadway in Rabbit Hole, Betrayal, and Laughter on the 23rd Floor. Off-Broadway credits include Three Days of Rain (L.A. Critics Award, Drama Desk nom.), and The Lisbon Traviata. On television he has been seen in Ed, K Street, Sex & the City, and Will & Grace. Films include Flags of Our Fathers, Mona Lisa Smile, The Station Agent, Traffic, and Sleepers.