Today’s links Molly McGhee’s “Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind”: A haunting novel of debt, work, dreams, and the capitalist nightmare. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading Molly McGhee’s “Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind” (permalink) Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind is Molly McGhee’s debut novel: a dreamlike tale of a public-private partnership that hires the terminally endebted to invade the dreams of white-collar professionals and harvest the anxieties that prevent them from being fully productive members of the American corporate workforce: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/734829/jonathan-abernathy-you-are-kind-by-molly-mcghee/ Though this is McGhee’s first novel, she’s already well known in literary circles. Her career has included stints at McSweeney’s, where she worked on my book Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free: https://store.mcsweeneys.net/products/information-doesn-t-want-to-be-free And then at Tor Books, where she worked on my book Attack Surface: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531/attacksurface But though McGhee is a shrewd and skilled editor, I think of her first and foremost as a writer, thanks to stunning essays like “America’s Dead Souls,” a 2021 Paris Review piece that described the experience of multigenerational debt in America in incandescent, pitiless prose: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/05/17/americas-dead-souls/ McGhee’s piece struck at the heart of something profoundly wrong in American society – the dual nature of debt, which represents a source of freedom for the wealthy, and bondage for workers: https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/19/zombie-debt/#damnation When billionaire mass-murderers like the Sacklers amass tens of billions of liabilities stemming from their role in deliberately starting the opioid crisis, the…Pluralistic: Molly McGhee's "Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind" (08 Jan 2024)