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Across the nine stories in MY STALKERS, Catherine Lacey’s second collection of short fiction, women are constantly confronted with the thrill, banality, and horror of becoming someone else—or no one at all—on account of men, technology, bureaucracy, or their own folly.
A woman finds a coat that isn’t hers in the house, and its appearance sets off a chain of events that destroys her life as she knew it. A mountain, one kilometer high, spontaneously materializes in rural Kansas, composed entirely of semiconscious men, provoking a female amateur athlete to climb it. An American living in Mexico is forced to face her irrevocable dependence on her home country, and the fragility of her own identity, when her passport is stolen. A woman is charged with a crime her all-seeing government insists it has photographic evidence of her committing, though she insists it was a doppelgänger, and while attempting to dispute the charge, the Kafkaesque bureaucracy becomes increasingly manipulative. And in the title story, a woman desperate to live any life but her own works as a Life Rotator, anonymously shuffled between a series of sparsely furnished homes in average American cities; her stalker finds her anyway, and threatens to topple her artificial stability.
With penetrating insights into the absurdities of modern life, Lacey once again reveals the disquieting and darkly humorous forces at work beneath the surface of the ordinary.
A woman finds a coat that isn’t hers in the house, and its appearance sets off a chain of events that destroys her life as she knew it. A mountain, one kilometer high, spontaneously materializes in rural Kansas, composed entirely of semiconscious men, provoking a female amateur athlete to climb it. An American living in Mexico is forced to face her irrevocable dependence on her home country, and the fragility of her own identity, when her passport is stolen. A woman is charged with a crime her all-seeing government insists it has photographic evidence of her committing, though she insists it was a doppelgänger, and while attempting to dispute the charge, the Kafkaesque bureaucracy becomes increasingly manipulative. And in the title story, a woman desperate to live any life but her own works as a Life Rotator, anonymously shuffled between a series of sparsely furnished homes in average American cities; her stalker finds her anyway, and threatens to topple her artificial stability.
With penetrating insights into the absurdities of modern life, Lacey once again reveals the disquieting and darkly humorous forces at work beneath the surface of the ordinary.
ON FRIENDSHIP: And Other Essays by Vivian Gornick
We live in a world where more people have access to free porn than to clean water. Every day, tens of thousands of hours of pornographic content are uploaded to the internet. We search more frequently for sexual terms than for SFW sites—the news, the weather, Reddit, YouTube.
Though porn is everywhere, we do not talk about it. We don’t admit to watching it—even as data shows that we do more and more, and from younger and younger ages, every year. Porn is not on the internet—it is the internet. And yet its history, its present, its sweeping influence on our private and public desires, our sexualities and our identities and our expectations, belong to a story that hasn’t been told—until now.
Building on five years of investigative reporting, Patricia Nilsson’s hyperintelligent, wildly ambitious, and deeply researched GUILTY PLEASURE takes us on a wild trip, from the golden age of Silicon Valley’s auteur era—Playboy, Deep Throat—to the fate of OnlyFans; from the dawn of the internet to the algorithmic, dopamine-addicted deluge of the present. Its cast of misfits and moguls includes everyone from fetish-film stars to anonymous influencers, the eccentric coders and tech bros and mysterious bankers who meet everywhere from châteaus in Prague to the storied boardrooms of our most powerful financial institutions. We learn how the logic of the internet and the logic of porn form the twinned centers of our attention economy, and how porn’s makers, grifters, consumers, workers, designers, and investors show us, and conceal from us, what we really want.
Though porn is everywhere, we do not talk about it. We don’t admit to watching it—even as data shows that we do more and more, and from younger and younger ages, every year. Porn is not on the internet—it is the internet. And yet its history, its present, its sweeping influence on our private and public desires, our sexualities and our identities and our expectations, belong to a story that hasn’t been told—until now.
Building on five years of investigative reporting, Patricia Nilsson’s hyperintelligent, wildly ambitious, and deeply researched GUILTY PLEASURE takes us on a wild trip, from the golden age of Silicon Valley’s auteur era—Playboy, Deep Throat—to the fate of OnlyFans; from the dawn of the internet to the algorithmic, dopamine-addicted deluge of the present. Its cast of misfits and moguls includes everyone from fetish-film stars to anonymous influencers, the eccentric coders and tech bros and mysterious bankers who meet everywhere from châteaus in Prague to the storied boardrooms of our most powerful financial institutions. We learn how the logic of the internet and the logic of porn form the twinned centers of our attention economy, and how porn’s makers, grifters, consumers, workers, designers, and investors show us, and conceal from us, what we really want.
THE DOUBLE DOROTHY by Olivia Waite
As the Fairweather approaches the halfway point of its journey, Dorothy Gentleman may have reached the end of hers . . .
It’s been a long lifetime, and Dorothy’s current body is on its last legs. With a new terminal diagnosis from Medical, she’s counting the days until her next reembodiment. But then a young man with someone else’s face sits down and claims he is Dorothy’s next embodiment—someone has triggered the system early, using the memory-book Dorothy last updated over a month ago.
Meaning that according to the laws, when Dorothy dies this time—it will be permanent.
Now Dorothy and her doppelganger must sift through that last month of memories, looking for a secret someone’s trying to erase. And all the threads lead back to the very first murder that happened on the Fairweather, five hundred years ago. A case which remains unsolved—and in which Dorothy was a witness, not a detective. All while an old enemy finally dares to step out of the shadows . . .
It’s been a long lifetime, and Dorothy’s current body is on its last legs. With a new terminal diagnosis from Medical, she’s counting the days until her next reembodiment. But then a young man with someone else’s face sits down and claims he is Dorothy’s next embodiment—someone has triggered the system early, using the memory-book Dorothy last updated over a month ago.
Meaning that according to the laws, when Dorothy dies this time—it will be permanent.
Now Dorothy and her doppelganger must sift through that last month of memories, looking for a secret someone’s trying to erase. And all the threads lead back to the very first murder that happened on the Fairweather, five hundred years ago. A case which remains unsolved—and in which Dorothy was a witness, not a detective. All while an old enemy finally dares to step out of the shadows . . .
A DIAGNOSIS by Elvia Wilk