In the opening chapters of Dave Eggers’ latest chilling novel, we get a glimpse at a dystopian future in which privacy is a thing of the past and humankind is completely in the thrall of technology. True connection and meaningful communication are withering away. Even the secretary of state tweets dancing rainbow emoji from the official U.S. Department of State account.

At the center of this new world order is the Every, a megacorporation that has acquired Amazon, all the major search engines and social media platforms, and thousands of other companies. Enter Delaney Wells, a young idealist (is there any other kind?) whose parents lost their small-town Idaho store to the Every and now must work for the Every’s Whole Foods-esque grocery service. Delaney believes the Every is “not only a monopoly but also the most reckless and dangerous corporate entity ever conjured—and an existential threat to all that was untamed and interesting about the human species.”

Delaney’s goal is to tear down the Every from the inside. She gets a job at its headquarters and enters an otherworldly corporate culture where everyone dresses the same, steals each others’ ideas and pledges cultlike allegiance to the Every. Delaney begins proposing increasingly outlandish ideas: How about an app that listens to your conversations, tracks the participants’ vital signs and assesses the quality of the interaction? Or artificial intelligence that measures art so we no longer need to decide for ourselves whether “The Last Supper” is beautiful? Or an app called HappyNow? that tells you whether you’re happy with your recent purchases?

To Delaney’s horror, the more ridiculous her pitches, the more enthusiasm they generate, both within the Every and among consumers. She realizes her plan to turn public opinion against the monolithic company has just one flaw: Consumers no longer care about privacy or free will.

Eggers has long established his almost supernatural storytelling skills, and this new book is positively mesmerizing and wholly original. The Every, a companion book to The Circle, will likely scare the bejesus out of readers. The vivid future he depicts feels fantastical but just realistic enough to make you want to unplug your smart speaker and toss your fitness watch.

Laura Hankin’s A Special Place for Women has a ripped-from-the-headlines hook: It’s heavily based on the controversial, real-life, women-only coworking space the Wing and related critiques of “girl boss” feminism, a phrase that diminishes women’s authority while masquerading as empowerment.

Narrator Jillian Beckley is an unemployed journalist from an unsexy part of Brooklyn who recently lost her mom. Jillian doesn’t have any female friends to speak of, but there are two men in her life: her childhood neighbor, who is New York’s hottest new chef, and a magazine editor on whom she has a crush. In a convoluted plan to impress the editor, Jillian pretends she is dating the chef in order to gain access to an elite club of powerful women called Nevertheless.  

This part of the story is similar to the movie Mean Girls, as Jillian initially mocks these out-of-touch women but quickly finds herself under their spell. Much of the novel alludes to possibly sinister goings-on at Nevertheless; Jillian worries that the organization is a shadowy cabal that ruins its enemies. At this, the reader may wonder if the novel is an overwrought sendup of the #girlboss culture that lauds female billionaires. After all, is there anything original left to say about wealthy, status-seeking women and the corrupting influence of power? 

But then, halfway through A Special Place for Women, a creative twist makes these events delightfully complex. This is where Hankin shows her range as a writer: The book you think you’re reading turns into something else entirely.

Admirably, the class analysis in A Special Place for Women is more finely tuned than most novels with an outsider-masquerading-as-an-insider storyline. That’s largely due to Jillian’s rock-solid millennial Everywoman voice, which allows her to stay relatable amid escalating bizarre circumstances. 

A Special Place for Women is a slow burn that’s ultimately fun, fresh and entirely worthwhile.

In his debut novel, Mateo Askaripour offers a witty yet thrilling examination of the complexities of race in corporate America. The novel centers on Darren Vender, a 22-year-old Black man who shares a Brooklyn brownstone with his mother and works as a shift leader at Starbucks. Despite graduating at the top of his high school class, Darren did not go to college and seems to lack ambition. That changes after a chance encounter with Rhett, the CEO of a buzzy tech startup called Sumwun, who invites Darren into the ruthless world of corporate sales.

At Sumwun, Darren’s attempt to climb the corporate ladder is met with multidimensional racist resistance. Sumwun’s director of sales and Darren’s direct supervisor, Clyde, is a quintessential racist. He disproportionately criticizes Darren and employs incredibly demeaning language while doing so. However, Sumwun also features more subtle forms of racism. For example, white employees often remark that Darren resembles Black celebrities who look nothing like Darren—and who look wildly different from each other.

While fighting for his upward mobility at Sumwun, Darren risks alienating his family, friends and himself. Eventually, an unfortunate incident rattles the foundation of Sumwun and sends Darren on a life-changing and culture-shifting journey that is full of twists, turns and some truly profound messages.

Black Buck is an ambitious book. While being an intellectual and captivating work of satire, it also serves as an instruction manual for Black and brown people working in white-dominated spaces. Askaripour embeds tokens of wisdom in his well-crafted plot and delivers direct messages of advice and encouragement to readers. There is great risk in such ambition, but Askaripour is a fine writer and superbly executes his vision.

This is an entertaining, accessible and thorough look at America's race problem, a book both of the moment and one for all seasons. It’s a necessary read for those living under the weight of oppressive systems as well as for those looking to better understand their complicity within them.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: How Mateo Askaripour climbed the corporate ladder, then spun what he learned into fiction gold.

Your favorite celebrity memoir was most likely written by a ghostwriter, an author who anonymously pens books for others (often famous folks) to publish under their own names. Taking a bunch of garbled notes from a celeb and writing up something legible is interesting work, to say the least.

Ghostwriters have to be adaptable and discreet about their clients. This hasn’t been a problem for ghostwriter Allie Lang, a single mom in suburban New England who is the main character in Heidi Pitlor’s Impersonation. Or rather, adaptability and discretion haven’t been a problem for Allie before—until she is hired to ghostwrite a book for famous activist Lana Breban about raising a feminist son.

Allie admires her ballsy new client, and adopting the voice of a trailblazing feminist comes naturally to her. Allie wants to raise a feminist son, too. Yet it becomes clear over time that the two women are not fighting the same battles. In fact, they might not even be fighting on the same battlefield. Lana has a financially generous book deal, an assistant and Hollywood pals on speed dial. Furthermore, she’s spent little to no time actually raising her son. She has a nanny for that.

Pitlor’s genius is that Impersonation doesn’t resort to pitting two women against each other. One woman’s career is circumscribed by care work, and the other’s career is not. But when Allie laments that “integrity—and real feminism—were clearly for people more financially secure than I,” it’s apparent that the issues between this ghostwriter and her client are emblematic of so much more. Impersonation isn’t just a critique of the “white feminism” of privileged women who prioritize money and success in existing power structures. It’s also more than a critique of the publishing industry, which only cares that Lana seems “maternal” enough to sell parenting books. Impersonation is a critique of our society’s fragile social safety net for so many vulnerable women, full of satirical humor and a lot of harsh truths.

As Brexit throws Britain into another protracted turmoil, Jonathan Coe once again turns his talents to documenting the state of the nation. Middle England’s authenticity lies in its characters—reintroduced from The Rotters’ Club (2001) and its follow-up, The Closed Circle (2004)—now in late-middle age, with grown children of their own, grappling with a country more divided than ever.

Like the previous works in this series, Middle England covers a lot of ground. It moves swiftly from the election of the coalition government in 2010 to the riots of 2011. The 2012 Olympics gives us a feel-good respite of multicultural pride, but that’s quashed by the 2016 referendum and its subsequent fallout, ending in 2018.

Though each chapter revolves around the storyline of its many characters, if there is a central protagonist it would be Benjamin Trotter, the focal point of Coe’s earlier works. He is now single, living in a Shropshire Mill House and toiling over a novel that has spiraled out of control. His sister, Lois, is in a dysfunctional marriage, and her daughter, Sofia, is a university lecturer who has embarked on an unlikely romance with a driving instructor, who is in thrall of his mother and her far-right views.

There are many other funny and fascinating characters, too: Sophia’s gay Sri Lankan best friend, Sahan; Charlie, a boyhood friend of Benjamin’s who is now scratching out a living as a clown for children’s parties; and Doug, another old friend, now a political journalist with his own faltering marriage and activist daughter.

At times the novel feels like Coe is cramming in as much action from topical events and somehow weaving it into the plot, but it’s really only a minor complaint. Middle England is a hilarious, nuanced and well-observed novel that keeps the pages turning while leaving a smile on readers’ faces.

“Bunny” is the cloyingly sweet pet name shared by four young women in Samantha’s MFA program. They even look sweet. Samantha has her own names for the Bunnies: She calls one “Cupcake” because “she looks like a cupcake. Dresses like a cupcake. Gives off the scent of baked lemony sugar. Pretty in a way that reminds you of frosting flourishes. She looks so much like a cupcake that when I first met her at orientation, I had a very real desire to eat her.”

They are the worst kind of friend group: cliquish, self-obsessed, prim, moneyed, privileged. But when they invite tall, awkward Samantha to a “smut salon,” she is curious despite herself. What could these cardigan-clad ladies—whose idea of a helpful fiction critique is clasping hands while proclaiming, Can I just say I loved living in your lines and that’s where I want to live forever now?—possibly know about smut? When Samantha arrives at a Bunny’s apartment for the event, she finds herself in the middle of a fever dream of an evening, with drinks and visits from her past and more drinks. As Samantha gets drawn into their circle, she learns that sometimes sweet is just a cover for something much more sinister.

Mona Awad made her mark with her acclaimed debut novel, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, a striking, at times heartbreaking examination of how body image affects modern life. Bunny is an astonishingly self-assured next step, a surreal journey into the depths of a nightmare. Awad’s writing is somehow both gorgeous and gritty as she explores creativity, art and the universal desire to belong.

What if you were God, going about your godly business—arbitrarily bestowing blessings and havoc upon humanity’s billions and enjoying the glorious handiwork of your cosmos—when, quite literally out of the blue, you started paying closer attention to a lanky geneticist named Daphne who works in a provincial Italian city? Well, of course you would have to write about it. Unfortunately, no language can ever adequately express God’s quandary of having fallen head-over-incorporeal-heels in love with a human. Therefore, the whole literary enterprise is a bust from the get-go. It’s a delightful, strikingly current, infectiously readable bust.

The irrational pull of erotic love has never had a funnier incarnation than the one in I Am God, the latest novel by satirical Italian author Giacomo Sartori. The deity’s infatuation with Daphne drives him crazier and crazier, until he must—no, I won’t spoil it for you. Besides, it’s just too embarrassing for poor ol’ God, as it never was for that serial sexual predator Zeus.

In composing Sono Dio (the original title sounds so much better), Sartori pulls out all the stops in a long tradition of first-person confessions by the Creator, beginning with the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. In the radical spirit of those biblical pronouncements, the words coming out of this God’s invisible mouth are altogether unnerving and explicitly reproachful to any belief system, whether orthodox or atheistic. Transcending mere blasphemy, Sartori refuses to take the Lord’s name in vain. Every little chapter of I Am God forces the reader to decide whether laughter or outrage is the proper response.

There’s a grand tradition of Italian artists (Dante, Michelangelo, Verdi) who shock us with their new and unsettling images of God. In his modest and profound way, Sartori belongs in this terrific company.

What’s a guru to do when he loses control of his own inspirational movement?

This question drives Hark, Sam Lipsyte’s trenchant satire about the quest for meaning and the extremes to which some people will go to achieve it.

If ever there lived an accidental messiah, it’s Hark Morner. His original goal—in one of Lipsyte’s many sly commentaries—was to be a stand-up comic. He wasn’t all that good, but a club owner booked him to perform his act on “the pitfalls of office life” at corporate gatherings. Hark quickly began to take his own words seriously. He had found his calling.

Hark calls his method “mental archery,” or “a few tricks, or tips, to help people focus,” which include everything from yoga and New Age speak to literal bows and arrows. It’s not long before he attracts adherents, who are feverishly devoted to Hark’s vision. Among them are Fraz Penzig, an unhappily married father of twins who is “rich in nutrients, solid from the gym,” yet perpetually feeling “on the verge of the verge of death”; Kate Rumpler, a young heiress who funds the nascent Harkist institute; and Teal Baker-Cassini, former Fulbright scholar and erstwhile embezzler, who now handles the group’s marketing.

Give the world a popular movement, and mercenaries are sure to follow. That’s what happens here, as social media tycoons and others try to monetize Hark’s movement, leaving the former comic to wonder what sort of joke he has unleashed on the world.

Oddly enough for a novel about the power of focus, Hark sometimes strays from its central story. But Lipsyte lands plenty of jabs at his targets, from internet trolls and conspiracy theorists to the desire for quick fixes to complicated problems.

If acidic satire helps you fend off life’s challenges, then put Hark in your quiver.

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It’s a phenomenon that has become all too familiar in the age of YouTube: An embarrassing video of a celebrity goes viral, obliterating a reputation with the speed and thoroughgoing devastation of an F5 tornado. In Talk to Me, his sly second novel, John Kenney (author of Truth in Advertising, which won the Thurber Prize for American Humor in 2014) dives into the muck of one such scandal, exploring its human toll while raising troubling questions about what it means to produce and consume news today.

The anchor of a highly rated network news show for two decades, Ted Grayson looks like he’s on top of his game. But when his ire at a young immigrant woman leads to a meltdown that’s captured on video, he’s launched on a downward spiral that threatens his career and causes him to question everything he thought he knew about being a journalist. Compounding Ted’s crisis is an impending divorce and the fact that his daughter, Franny, works as a reporter at the bottom-feeding website scheisse.com, run by a young German billionaire whose motto is “NO RULES. JUST CLICKS,” and who’s only too happy to capitalize on Ted’s sudden fall.

Kenney takes the reader inside the maelstrom of the 24/7 news cycle, as an increasingly bewildered Ted watches his world collapse around him, helpless to counteract the forces fueling his destruction. In Ted, Kenney has created a sympathetic and fully realized protagonist who’s haunted by the price he’s paid for a success that now seems hollow, by the decay of his marriage to a woman he still loves and by an estrangement from his daughter that’s deep enough to allow her to become complicit in his downfall.

For all the fast-paced and knowing entertainment it provides, Talk to Me may also serve as a useful antidote to rushed judgment when the next celebrity scandal erupts.

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Poor Jason Fitger. In Dear Committee Members, Julie Schumacher’s hilarious 2014 novel, Fitger is a tenured professor of English at the second-rate Payne University, where he has a dingy office by the bathroom, writes sardonic letters of recommendation and gripes about the school’s political in-fighting.

Life isn’t much better in The Shakespeare Requirement, Schumacher’s entertaining follow-up. Fitger is now the department chair, to the faculty’s dismay. That’s not his only problem: The university has renovated Willard Hall, but only for the Economics department, which now enjoys hot-and-cold water fountains and an espresso bar. English is stuck in the dilapidated lower floors, where Fitger has a “barbarically hot” office with “fossilized apple cores” under his desk and wasps in the windows.

That isn’t indignity enough for Roland Gladwell, the Economics chair. He wants to get rid of the English department entirely, so he convinces Phil Hinckler, dean of the university and Fitger’s ex-wife’s boyfriend, to let him chair a quality-assessment program that he hopes will help achieve his goal.

One of the ways English can survive is by submitting an acceptable Statement of Vision. This, too, poses problems, as the proposed statement eliminates the requirement that all students take a Shakespeare course, a change that infuriates the department’s Shakespeare scholar and becomes a cause célèbre among the student body.

The novel includes many colorful characters, among them Fitger’s assistant, Fran, who’d much rather be an animal behavior consultant, and Angela Vackray, a freshman who gets into trouble with a boy from her Bible study.

Schumacher’s humor can be broad—a centenary celebration is called “One Hundred Years of Payne”—but the book has more laugh-out-loud lines than most novels, and she wields cutting remarks that are as sharp as ever. The Shakespeare Requirement is a bitter delight, perhaps, but a delight nonetheless.

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.