ISBN: 1555970583 9781555970581

Category: Fiction / Literary

Page count: 208

<p><b>A quartet of audacious fictions that capture the pathos and absurdity of life in the age of the internet</b><br><br><i>*A</i> New York Times Book<i> Review Editors' Choice*</i><br><i>* </i>One of Flavorwire's "50 Books That Define the Past Five Years in Literature"<br><br>A spectacularly talented young writer has returned from the present with <i>Four New Messages</i>, urgent and visionary dispatches that seek to save art, sex, and even alienation from corporatism and technology run rampant.<br><br>In "Emission," a hapless drug dealer in Princeton is humiliated when a cruel co-ed exposes him exposing himself on a blog gone viral. "McDonald's" tells of a frustrated pharmaceutical copywriter whose imaginative flights fail to bring solace because of a certain word he cannot put down on paper. In "The College Borough" a father visiting NYU with his daughter remembers a former writing teacher, a New Yorker exiled to the Midwest who refuses to read his students' stories, asking them instead to build a replica of the Flatiron Building. "Sent" begins mythically in the woods of Russia, but in a few virtuosic pages plunges into the present, where an aspiring journalist finds himself in a village that shelters all the women who've starred in all the internet porn he's ever enjoyed.<br><br>Highbrow and low-down, these four intensely felt stories explain what happens when the virtual begins to colonize the real -- they harness the torrential power and verbal dexterity that have established Cohen as one of America's most brilliant younger writers.</p>