Join us as we host Joanne McNeil for a reading of Wrong Way and Q&A with Courtney Stanton!
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Joanne McNeil is the author of the novel WRONG WAY (2023) and LURKING (2020). She was the inaugural winner of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation's Arts Writing Award for an emerging writer. She has been a resident at Eyebeam, a Logan Nonfiction Program fellow, recipient of the Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and an instructor at the School for Poetic Computation.
She's currently working on another nonfiction book, TOO EARLY FOR THE FUTURE, on the practice and history of speculating on the future.
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For years, Teresa has passed from one job to the next, settling into long stretches of time, struggling to build her career in any field or unstick herself from an endless cycle of labor. The dreaded move from one gig to another is starting to feel unbearable. When a recruiter connects her with a contract position at AllOver, it appears to check all her prerequisites for a “good” job. It’s a fintech corporation with progressive hiring policies and a social justice-minded mission statement. Their new service for premium members: a functional fleet of driverless cars. The future of transportation. As her new-hire orientation reveals, the distance between AllOver’s claims and its actions is wide, but the lure of financial stability and a flexible schedule is enough to keep Teresa driving forward.
Joanne McNeil, who often reports on how the human experience intersects with labor and technology brings blazing compassion and criticism to Wrong Way, examining the treacherous gaps between the working and middle classes wrought by the age of AI. Within these divides, McNeil turns the unsaid into the unignorable, and captures the existential perils imposed by a nonstop, full-service gig economy.
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Best Books of 2023, The New Yorker
Endless Bookshelf Book of the Year
“Joanne McNeil’s masterful debut is a powerful example of what the contemporary novel can and should be in our endlessly perplexing times.” ―Tim Maughan, author of Infinite Detail
“No one understands the dark side of the gifts offered by billionaire tech gurus better than Joanne McNeil. With Wrong Way, our most prescient tech critic has turned to fiction, giving us a glimpse of a near future defined less by wondrous new gadgets and genius AI than by with the pretense of innovation slapped on ever more alienating work done by people who remain, despite everything, human. In prose at times dreamy and lacerating, McNeil shows us what’s coming, and how easily we might wind up accepting it.”
―Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won’t Love You Back
"A strange, surprising, and sinister kaleidoscope of a novel. Joanne McNeil, with a dazzling wit and eye for detail, guides us through a capitalist gig-economy world both relatable and startlingly visionary. WRONG WAY stands out sparklingly from the crowd of current novels. I found myself describing it, recommending it, to a person on the subway I barely knew. I really love this book.”
—Scott Heim, author of Mysterious Skin
"With her signature mix of intelligent, tender, and engaging prose, Joanne McNeil has written a brilliant novel in Wrong Way, which interrogates the promises of the tech utopia through the lives of the invisible labor behind the hype."
—Zito Madu, author of The Minotaur at Calla Lanza
"Wrong Way is a chilling portrait of economic precarity, and a disturbing reminder of how attempts to optimize life and work leave us all alienated."
―Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire
"[A] smart debut novel...By creating a predicament for her protagonist that could soon resemble ones we'll face, McNeil creates a compelling examination of work and our relationship to it."
—Booklist
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Courtney Stanton is an extravagantly queer trans man whose writing has previously appeared in Buzzfeed, Jezebel, Wired, and more quote-tweets than he would prefer. He spent 2020 driving an ambulance, 2021 recovering from that experience, and he's spending 2022 producing zines of poetry, most recently Schatzi. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his husband, two cats, and a few plants that insist on living despite his best efforts.
Visit him on Instagram @mrcourtneystanton to know when the next zine will be released.