Category: personal
One morning in 2013, I picked up my phone when I woke up and noticed a Google notification that said, “If you leave right now, you will make it to YogaWorks at 7.28.” I had never told Google what day of the week, what time of day, or even that I went to yoga, but the company had tracked my movements and in time its algorithms had learned my schedule and habits.
Not long after, the magazine Slate reported that Facebook keeps track of everything its users do on the app, including their keystrokes. I realized that if Facebook has a record of unposted comments, in effect it has access to our unvoiced opinions, which is to say our thoughts. I remember I turned to my husband and said, “Pretty soon the only privacy we will have will be in our dreams.” And then I thought, wait. What if someday even dreams are monitored?
I started exploring this idea in novel form, but after about seventy pages I hit a road block and decided to focus on a different novel I’d been working on, a family story set in the Mojave. Still, the idea of dream surveillance stayed in the back of my mind and, after The Other Americans was published, I returned to it, working slowly through the early days of the pandemic. I completed The Dream Hotel a few months ago and it is now in production, with this striking cover from the incomparable Jack Smyth.
The Dream Hotel is set in Los Angeles in the near future and follows a thirty-eight-year old archivist. Sara leads what is by all appearances an ordinary life: she works at a local museum, has a husband and twin toddlers, and spends her free time hiking or backpacking. One day, on her return home from a conference abroad, agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime.
Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that Sara is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days. The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them people trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended.
Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.
The Dream Hotel is set for release in the U.S. in March 2025 with Pantheon Books. Hop on over to People magazine for more details about the story and an exclusive excerpt from the first chapter!
And now, a humble request. As you all know, pre-orders are crucial to the launch of a book. If the description above appeals to you, please preorder the book now from your favorite retailer.
And now, some news before I go on summer hiatus!
It was a pleasure to guest-edit the spring issue of the literary magazine Ploughshares, with poems by Mosab Abu Toha, Khaled Mattawa, January Gill O’Neil, Rob Shapiro, Connor Watkins-Xu; excerpts from forthcoming novels by Jane Smiley and Nina McConigley; short fiction from Emily Doyle, Francisco Goldman, Jamila Minnicks, and Tommy Orange; and essays by Hannah Roberts, Tochi Onyebuchi, and Farah Abdessamad, among many others. You can buy a copy of the magazine from the Ploughshares website, or find it in your local library or independent bookstore.
Late last spring, I sat down with Dylan Cuellar and Kassia Osset, hosts of the Unburied Books podcast, to discuss Tayeb Salih’s classic novel Season of Migration to the North, translated from the Arabic by Denys Johnson-Davies. It’s one of those books that gets pressed into new hands by devoted fans like me, and I never tire of talking about it. (Or writing about it! I wrote the introduction for the NYRB Classics edition of the book.) If you like stories of departures and returns, strong narrators, and doomed love affairs, you will love this one.
I also had the great honor to serve on the jury for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize, along with Jen Sookfong Lee, Claire Messud, Dolen Perkins-Valdez, and Eden Robinson. This (newish) prize aims to radically transform the economic circumstances of women and nonbinary writers by awarding a significant amount of money to the winner ($150,000) and a fairly substantial amount to the finalists as well. The jury spent about twelve months reading and discussing hundreds of entries before deciding on the finalists: Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, Daughter by Claudia Dey, Coleman Hill by Kim Coleman-Foote, Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan, and A History of Burning by Janika Oza. The winner, announced at a ceremony in Toronto in May was Brotherless Night by V.V. (Sugi) Ganeshananthan, a searing novel set during the early years of Sri Lanka’s civil war.
I’m delighted to share that my most recent novel, The Other Americans, is the March selection of the California Book Club. For the occasion, I wrote an essay on belonging and unbelonging for Alta Magazine. In the same issue is a review and recommendation from the magazine’s books editor, David L. Ulin. The book club discussion will take place online, so please join me in conversation with John Freeman on March 21. Register here.
In other news, I contributed to my friend Jami Attenberg’s anthology, 1000 Words: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round. The piece is about how writing was my buoy through an ocean of grief after the death of my father; I honestly don’t think I would’ve made it through if I hadn’t been writing. The list of contributors is staggeringly good, with all kinds of advice on how to stay creative. Take a look!
This is a picture of me in my light-filled office at the Radcliffe Institute, where I’ve been working on my new novel these last few months. The weather has started to cool, and we’ve already had a sprinkling of snow, so I’m going to take advantage of the winter break to return to the California desert for a few weeks. But I wanted to post a few updates here before I forget.
I reviewed two books that were recently published in English translation: Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s The Most Secret Memory of Men for The Washington Post and Chantal Montellier’s graphic novel Social Fiction for The Nation. I miss writing about books, and I hope to be able to do more of it in the new year.
It was a delight to hear that Time magazine selected The Other Americans as one of its 100 Best Mystery and Thriller Books of All Time, alongside works by masters of the genre (Patricia Highsmith! Raymond Chandler! Chester Himes!) and contemporary authors, many of them dear friends.
This fall, I was in conversation with Viet Thanh Nguyen for the second of his Norton lectures at Harvard, “On Speaking as an Other.” If you’re interested, you can watch the lecture and convo in full here. I also served as a table host for the Words Without Borders annual gala. WWB is a wonderful organization that promotes global literature, and is often the first to publish international writers in the United States. There was a nice write-up about the event in the New York Times.
As always, you can keep up with my work through Instagram and BlueSky (and Twitter, for however long it lasts). You can also check out my events page for public readings and talks.