Electric Literature. In 2013, Fassler started The Atlantic’s “By Heart” series, in which he interviewed authors—including Stephen King, Elizabeth Gilbert, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, Carmen Maria Machado, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and more—about the literature that shaped their lives and work. That led to editing Light the Dark, a book-length collection that included favorites from “By Heart” alongside new contributions. Fassler’s nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Guardian, Longreads, and The Best American Food Writing. Fassler currently teaches writing at Vermont’s Sterling College. The Sky Was Ours is his first novel.
At Electric Lit Fassler tagged seven "warped versions of reality [in which] tech is expanding the scope of what’s possible, at a cost." One title on the list:
The Candy House by Jennifer EganRead about the other entries on the list.
In some ways, the invention at the heart of Egan’s novel isn’t so different from today’s internet: it’s a portal that lets billions ofstrangers connect. But our texts and posts and reels seem pretty crude compared to what’s possible with the Mandala Consciousness Cube, which lets you crawl fully inside another person’s skull. With the help of a few electrodes, people can upload their memories into a vast repository, where they can be viscerally experienced by anyone with a cube. (The device, as it works, becomes “warm as a freshly laid egg.”) It’s an unnerving portrait of the way technology hacks individual agency, coercing us into adoption no matter how much we might want to resist. And as the cube collapses distance between people, resulting in new connections that can be redemptive or uncomfortably close, Egan seems to wonder: Do we really need Silicon Valley to understand each other better? Don’t we already have fiction?
--Marshal Zeringue
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