Out There
Stories
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- 5,99 €
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- 5,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
'Extraordinary . . . Folk is a dazzling talent' Karen Joy Fowler
'Wonderfully weird' Daily Mail
A woman uses dating apps to find a partner, despite the threat posed by 'blots', artificial men more interested in stealing data than dating. A sculptor, trapped in a skyscraper restaurant when a violent coup erupts below, creates a perfect model of the town as it is destroyed. A curtain of void obliterates the world at a steady pace, leaving one woman to decide with whom she wants to spend eternity.
Haunting and darkly inventive, the stories in Out There deftly combine science fiction and horror to uncover an unforgettable vision of the absurdity of life in the digital age.
'The literary love child of Kafka and Camus and Bradbury penning episodes of Black Mirror' Chang-Rae Lee, author of Native Speaker
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Folk debuts with a wonderful absurdist collection that explores the vagaries of human connections. In the title story, the narrator can't tell if her new boyfriend is an especially refined "blot," one of the legions of catfishing androids who recently invaded internet dating, or just a tech bro who's emotionally stunted. Shorter stories act as well-timed interludes, such as "The House's Beating Heart," in which a house has a beating heart in a closet, a brain in the roof, and a stomach in the basement. Folk soars in "A Scale Model of Gull Point," in which a tourist island's inhabitants—oppressed in ways simultaneously bonkers and viciously realistic—enact a reign of terror, and the crisis prompts a burst of maturity for the narrator, an art teacher whose sculpture career never took off after her MFA. "Big Sur," another highlight, follows the life of a blot who bunks in an SRO and attempts to get a girlfriend with messages like, "I love dogs... I would never hurt one deliberately." The story risks a sentimentality anathema to the previous stories' cynicism, and pulls it off with aplomb. The whole perfectly balances compassion and caustics, and the author has an easy hand blending everyday terror with the humor that helps people swallow it. Folk impresses with her imagination as well as her insights.
