Nic Sacco and Bart Vanzetti rise to fame from a seedy New York vaudeville club via their famous knife-throwing gag, landing precipitately in the bigtime. This work is: part comic novel; part satire; part Pynchonesque slurring of synchronous narratives into historical allegory; and part political commentary.

The Nic Sacco and Bart Vanzetti of Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die! are not exactly the infamous anarchists controversially sentenced to death by the United States government. Instead, in this hilarious first novel, they are silent film stars, slapstick comedians--and this is the story of their rise to fame, from a seedy New York vaudeville club (where they introduce their famous knife-throwing gag) to huge movies and USO tours (where they open, with disastrous results, for Bob Hope). We see them deliberating about who--one will be fat, the other skinny; one will be contemplative, the other impulsive--they should be. But slowly--as slapstick becomes a stand-in for anarchic freedom, as the characters grow out of their on-screen roles, and as their careers decline amidst controversy--the fictional Sacco and Vanzetti begin to merge with their namesakes. A first-generation American, Mark Binelli grew up just outside of Detroit, where he worked in his father's knife-sharpening shop. In an interview, which is available online and will appear in Context magazine, Binelli said, "The knife grinding stuff in the book all comes from my family. Pinzolo, the little town in Italy where my father grew up, for some reason has produced an inordinate number of knife grinders." He graduated from the University of Michigan and received an MFA from Columbia University. He is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die! is his first novel.