Burn Zone Out Now

A new novella by Cairo Smith.

If you have problems with the links in this email, try pulling up the announcement in the app or on the website.

---

Dear friends and colleagues,

Here’s a small surprise. My new novella, Burn Zone, is out today in digital and paperback.

It’s a tribunal thriller about a White House staffer detained by an international coalition to be judged for his actions in a failed American war, one in which we somehow managed to tick off almost the entire world at once.

It’s hot on the heels of Current Affairs, yes, but there’s no time like the present. As the hand of Death looms greedily over our domesticity, we should all endeavor to complete and share our works with a certain urgent sobriety. Don’t you think?

Burn Zone is a brisk read, less than a third of the length of Current Affairs and a quarter of the length of Komodo. It is, of course, exactly as long as it should be.

The story itself originated in mid-2025, when my good friend and cinematographer Tamas Harangi told me he wanted me to apply myself to a tense, contemporary ensemble conversation thriller. ‘Contemporary,’ in the process of development, ended up becoming slightly speculative, but the core feeling remains.

There’s a certain playlike quality to Burn Zone. I’m sure you’ll agree. I’d be curious to know whom you would cast in each role. I’m sure I owe something to Kelly Reichardt and Philip Roth for showing me what is possible with dialogue, and to Christopher Logue (and by extension Henry Begler for introducing me to Logue) for showing me a towering example of Modernist fragmentary style.

There is a lot to be said about Burn Zone on the subject of national and international morality that is probably best said by others, not myself. The novella has elements of horror, but it is not about monsters or maniacs. It imagines a world where the United States took on almost the entire world in a cascading armed crisis in the 21st century and lost. The idea of justice circles the story, searching for a home, unsure of where to land and safely roost.

Ultimately, Burn Zone is about peremptory norms and the violence enacted both for and against them. It’s about the tension inherent to living in a world constantly engaged in moral consensus-seeking and assertion through force. It’s about what it has meant and what it will mean to be American.

I hope you enjoy the novella. It’s a new high for me in terms of fragmentary, near-poetic prose, and I am quite proud of what has been packed into 28,000 words.

It’s for sale now. You can also read the first chapter for free here:

Burn Zone

Thank you as always for your patronage,

Cairo