Indeed, the core of this book is the role and responsibility of the writer-more than relevant in today’s unsettling political landscape. But Mann, now living in Munich and married into a converted Jewish family, believes that Germans are too sane to buy into Hitler’s propaganda. When Adolph Hitler launched the Nazi Party, Mann’s left-wing, successful novelist brother rang the bells. The opening is set in the northern German city of Lübeck, where Mann’s father was a prominent businessman and political figure. Tóibín explores Mann’s deceit, his sexuality, and his disdain for the status quo. It combines fiction and biography about Thomas Mann, one of Germany’s greatest twentieth-century writers, and is a glimpse into high German society. Judy Dempsey: After twenty-three months without traveling, I boarded a plane earlier this month with The Magician, Colm Tóibín’s new novel. Written by Colm Tóibín and published by Simon & Schuster. And as the book ends right around the 2016 election, I especially appreciated it for the questions it raises on the industry’s implications for power, inequality, and democracy. Multiple startups raised money to build communal living spaces in neighborhoods where people were getting evicted for living in communal living spaces.”)Īs an outsider to Silicon Valley myself, I appreciated her as my sharp yet bewildered guide to this foreign land and its strange mores. (Wiener says, “Everyone was reading ‘The Power Broker’-or, at least, reading summaries of it. I stayed for the vivid, tragicomic observations on tech culture and its environs and for the vignettes on everything from start-up management practices to gender relations to the San Francisco housing crisis. I got hooked by her voice (originally from a New Yorker essay, where she is now a staff writer). Uncanny Valley follows author Anna Wiener’s journey over the next four years through start-ups. She moves to the Bay Area to work for an analytics firm with cofounders, “now twenty-four and twenty-five, with one Silicon Valley internship between them and a smart, practical dream of a world driven by the power of Big Data.” A career in tech is born. Although she fails to “add value” in that particular role (her primary duties turn out to be snack procurement for the cofounders), she gets another offer with another start-up. She interviews for a job with the founders-themselves three dudes in their twentysomethings-and is hired on a three-month contract. One day, over her chopped salad desk lunch, she reads about a tech start-up looking to “disrupt” the publishing industry. Our heroine, a twentysomething liberal arts grad living in Brooklyn, works as an assistant in publishing-for a salary that’s also in the twentysomethings. Written by Anna Wiener and published by MCD Books.įrances Z.