Amazon Moves Peres’s “The New Middle East” To Fantasy Section

Some committee members wanted to relegate The New Middle East to the humor section.

Seattle, May 8 – Internet commerce giant Amazon.com has reclassified a non-fiction work by former Israeli President Shimon Peres about Mideast peace, instead categorizing it as fantasy alongside Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and similar works involving alternative universes, imaginary creatures, and magic.

The retailer announced the recategorization today, informing thousands of registered users with an interest in political works of the change, which will take effect Monday. A company representative explained the move as consistent with Amazon’s policy on monitoring and reviewing its product category classification system.

“We periodically review the classification of every product in our system,” said the company’s Executive Vice President for Marketing, Rhea Liszt. “The most recent assessment of non-fiction book titles found that Shimon Peres’s 1993 exploration of new possibilities for Middle East peace based on mutually beneficial economic development and prosperity for Israel and its Arab neighbors found that it fits better with Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series than with, for example, Natan Scharansky’s memoirs.”

Liszt explained that Peres’s notion that Israel’s neighbors, principally the Palestinians, would, or even could, use the prospect of economic gain to sideline or overcome almost inbred opposition to Israel’s very existence, belongs more to the realm of Bilbo Baggins than that of Mahmoud Abbas. “It was an appealing idea, that Arafat, and Abbas after him, might choose the welfare of his people over perpetual conflict, but in the end, Peres might as well have suggested a few well-placed Imperius curses could also solve the conflict once and for all,” she added, invoking J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. “In retrospect, the only way to explain such a premise, and such a work, is to imagine or assume that the author was under the influence of powerful hallucinogens, a burst of creative imagination, or both. The members of the review committee realized the book still had the categorization its publisher gave it more than two decades ago, and took the necessary steps to fix that.”

“Some committee members wanted to relegate The New Middle East to the humor section,” Liszt continued. “And we had a spirited discussion of the merits of that classification. Finally, however, one of my fellow executives pointed out that there was no indication the book was written with anything than the utmost sincerity and earnestness, so while it may be intensely and darkly hilarious, the hilarity was unintentional. The vote for ‘fantasy’ carried the day.”

In related news, Amazon performed a similar recategorization of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto.