Journey to Virginland - Epistle I

At turns heartbreaking and diabolically funny, Journey to Virginland is a tour de force, delivered by a master storyteller.

The protagonist, a loutish and uber-cerebral antihero known simply as Dog, takes on the challenge to navigate the perilous paradigm shifts of our age, determined to find his proper place under the sun. Is he doomed to failure? Or will he pull it off by heeding his own irreducible voice, given the ebb of the old certainties?

Dog pursues the answer unrelentingly, through an impassioned quest for identity and meaning. He revisits his relationships with women, family, literature, and homeland, in the process illuminating his journey with commentaries on history, religion, politics, and culture that unravel our very fabric.

Marked by biting satire and tappings into lushest scholarship, Dog’s naked critique touches on some of the most pressing issues facing humanity: the arrogance of empire and organized religion; the persistence of bigotry, xenophobia, and social Darwinism; the double standards of sexual politics; the bankrupt rationale behind patriotism and state propaganda; and hypercapitalism and consumerism, among others.

An ocean of struggles and epiphanies takes Dog to a spiritual ground zero called Virginland, where the story unfolds. It is also in Virginland that Dog unearths an ancient calendar based on a cosmic worldview. His discovery reveals the mythological underpinnings of the Zodiac, subverting the current conventional wisdom about the subject.

What emerges from the protagonist’s odyssey is not only a cogent depiction of what makes us tick, but, as day follows night, a dazzling new vista for social and spiritual transformation.

With its vibrant style, thematic breadth, and, ultimately, unfettered sense of humanity, Journey to Virginland establishes itself as a groundbreaking literary enterprise and a true original.

Armen Melikian (b. 1963) is one of those rare thinkers whose intensity of passion matches their sharp wit and intellect. His poignant observations take to task the core tenets of meta-ideologies and jockeying civilizations, helping to discard layer after layer of entrenched misinformation and dogma.

Melikian brings a fresh, prodigiously layered voice to contemporary literature. He expands the limits of the novel as an art medium, and infuses it with extraordinary urgency and relevance in terms of sociopolitical, cultural, religious, philosophical thought as well as mythological exegesis.

Melikian earned a Master’s in international relations from American University in Washington, DC. He also studied mathematics at Harvard and elsewhere. However, he eventually abandoned both politics and mathematics in favor of literature and dedicated his life to writing. Melikian lives in Los Angeles.