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In The Dead, Award�winning author Christian Kracht presents a historical novel of international conspiracy, cinematic intrigue, and murder set before World War II, in the early years of the Axis powers� rise to tyranny. In The Dead, the follow-up to his acclaimed novel Imperium (a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year), Christian Kracht mines the feverish film culture of the 1930s to produce a Gothic tale of global conspiracy, personal loss, and historical entanglements large and small. In Berlin, Germany, in the early 1930s, the acclaimed Swiss film director Emil N�geli receives the assignment of a lifetime: travel to Japan and make a film to establish the dominance of Adolf Hitler�s Nazi empire once and for all. But his handlers are unaware that N�geli has colluded with the Jewish film critics to pursue an alternative objective�to create a monumental, modernist, allegorical spectacle to warn the world of the horror to come. Meanwhile, in Japan, the film minister Masahiko Amakasu intends to counter Hollywood�s growing influence and usher in a new golden age of Japanese cinema by exploiting his Swiss visitor. The arrival of N�geli�s film-star fianc�e and a strangely thuggish, pistol-packing Charlie Chaplin�as well as the first stirrings of the winds of war�soon complicates both Amakasu�s and N�geli�s plans, forcing them to face their demons . . . and their doom.