National Magazine Award finalist Christopher Howard"s debut novel, Tea of Ulaanbaatar, tells the story of disaffected Peace Corps volunteer Warren, who flees life in late-capitalist America to find himself stationed in the post-Soviet industrial hell of urban Mongolia. As the American presence crumbles, Warren seeks escape in tsus, the mysterious "blood tea" that may be the final revenge of the defeated Khans8212;or that may be only a powerful hallucinogen operating on an uneasy mind8212;as a phantasmagoria of violence slowly envelops him.With prose that combines Benjamin Kunkel"s satiric bite, William Burroughs8217;s dark historical reimagining, and a lush literary beauty all his own, Christopher Howard in Tea of Ulaanbaatar unfolds a story of expatriate angst, the dark side of globalization, and middle-class nightmares8212;and announces himself as one of the most inventive and ambitious of the new generation of American novelists.