A priest with no soul. A humanitarian with no heart. An American soldier with no honor. A reporter with no clue. All of them collide with a warlord of an oil-rich nation of his own bloody creation. Horrifyingly enough, hilarity ensues. A handful of characters with conflicting agendas and competing deadlines slam together spectacularly in the final days of the Cold War. They live and love and lie to each other in an alternative universe of frightening familiarity. Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Mark Fritz, who covered every significant global event since the fall of the Berlin Wall, upends accepted notions of piety and patriotism and exposes a media machine's clownishly inept coverage of a world unraveling. Fritz is the author of LOST ON EARTH: Nomads of the New World, winner of the Salon non-fiction award, of which judges noted: "Although Fritz's subject is cruel, his book is strangely delightful." PERMANENT DEADLINE is, in spirit, a fictionalized sequel to LOST ON EARTH. Beneath the brutally black comic take on real events beats the heart of humanity. Some early reviews: "Delightfully wicked. Funny as hell. I suppose it could be called blasphemous." Father Daniel Beegan, pastor, St. Brendan's Roman Orthodox Parish. ---------- "Permanent Deadline is an insider's look into what it's like to be an outsider in the club of "professional journalism" and so much more. Mark is a renegade. He paid his dues at "The Bureau." He is, and will always be, one of the most fascinating minds I will ever meet." Cami McCormick, war correspondent and six-time winner of the Edward R. Murrow Award. One of the great journalists of my generation. ----------- "Unlike so many corporate journalists, Fritz loves to rock the boat," Dana Kennedy, foreign correspondent and hard-core cultural observer for CNN, ABC News, MSNBC, CNBC, Fox News, The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, Time.