Breaking and Entering
Joy Williams' descriptions are incredible and the trajectories she traces are all viable but damn, they are all bleak
Fake Accounts
Berlin is wasted on this protagonist; so is NYC. The lesson for all of us is to put the damn phone down.
We Run the Tides
If there were any doubt as the viciousness of 8th grade girls, Vendela Vida dispels it. She perfectly captures the voice of Eulabee, a 13-year old girl growing up in Sea Cliff in San Francisco in the 80s, navigating the awkward and painful trajectory of middle school with its mean girls and mixed-message emitting boys.
Memorial: A Novel
In Houston, a Black daycare worker is left alone with the Japanese mother of his boyfriend for weeks after the boyfriend abruptly leaves to see his dying father in Osaka
BlockChain Chicken Farm
Blockchain chicken farming is either the utopian or dystopian apotheosis of farm-to-table, depending on your particular bent. For Xiaowei Wang, an artist and writer who embraces technology but is no fervent evangelist, it’s the perfect lens through which to explore the trade-offs that come in the name of progress.
Billion Dollar Loser
WeWork founder Adam Neumann made his first foray into entrepreneurship developing high-heeled shoes that could transform into flats (an employee nearly lost a finger while trying to demonstrate the sample product) and
The Memory Police
What if the government just started disappearing things — music, birds, fruit, boats, novels (!) — resulting in a collective forgetting and irreparable loss?
What Happens at Night
I loved this book. Some sort of David Lynch-ian fugue in a small eastern European town where the hotel bar serves lichen-flavored schnapps and “meat” sandwiches