A Brief History
of Stealing

Possession has always needed a good explanation.

A Brief History of Stealing turns a satirical eye toward one of civilization's oldest arrangements: somebody has something, somebody else wants it, and eventually a very impressive explanation appears for why the transfer was perfectly legitimate.

People steal plainly enough. Institutions are often more creative. A stolen object can become property. Taken land can become territory. Appropriated labor can become productivity. Borrowed ideas can become innovation. Once enough paperwork, authority, tradition, or respectable language surrounds an act, the argument may shift from whether something was taken to whether anyone still has permission to complain.

The absurdity lies not only in theft itself, but in the elaborate moral categories human beings construct around it. One person steals. Another acquires. Someone else annexes, appropriates, inherits, restructures, monetizes, privatizes, discovers, or simply arrives first with better lawyers.

Through satire and social commentary, the novel examines ownership, entitlement, power, history, class, institutions, memory, and the stories societies tell about who is entitled to possess what.

A Brief History of Stealing is a comic examination of the remarkably thin line between taking something and successfully convincing everyone that it was yours all along.