Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind Molly McGhee

HARDCOVER

ISBN: 9781662602115

PUB DATE: October 17, 2023

272pp

Price: $26 US / $35 CAN

MOLLY MCGHEE is from a cluster of unincorporated towns outside of Nashville, Tennessee. She completed her M.F.A. in fiction at Columbia University. Currently living in Brooklyn, her work has appeared in The Paris Review. Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind is her first novel.

For readers of Patricia Lockwood and Ling Ma, a debut novel for the modern working stiff.

Jonathan Abernathy is a loser . . . he’s behind on his debts, he has no prospects, no friends, no redeeming qualities. But when a government loan forgiveness program offers him a literal dream job, he thinks he’s found his big break. If he can appear to be competent at his new job, entering the minds of middle class workers while they sleep and removing the unsavory detritus of their waking lives from their unconscious, he might have a chance at a new life. As he finds his footing in this new role, reality and morality begin to warp around him. Soon, the lines between life and work, love and hate, right and wrong, even sleep and consciousness, begin to blur.

With all the dramatic irony of Charlie Kaufman as written by Kurt Vonnegut, Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind touches on a theme most people know all too well—the relentlessly crushing weight of debt. A workplace novel, at once tender, startling, and deeply funny, Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind is borne of its milieu, for those readers who see something of themselves in its protagonist.

With a keen sense of her readers, a wry wit, and an undeniable dexterity with language, Molly McGhee’s debut novel is a piercing critique of late-stage capitalism and a reckoning with its true cost.

PRAISE FOR Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind

“Molly McGhee reminds me of absolutely no one. Here’s an original mind brimming over with invention and comic ferocity and a new world sensibility that serves to remind us what good hands the future of literature is in. I am hugely excited for everyone to read this mad, hilarious writer.” —Ben Marcus, Guggenheim Fellow and author of The Flame Alphabet

“The fiction of Molly McGhee is funny, freaky, intellectually bold and always from the heart. McGhee has seen enough of the world to know that you’ve got to start some trouble in it. She also knows that seeing the humor in our personal foibles and social absurdities (cruel as the latter often are), will always be a powerful way to commiserate with your fellow humans. Here is a writer who is keenly aware of what we’ve all got coming, but in the meantime is never afraid to laugh and live and fight on the page.” —Sam Lipsyte, Guggenheim Fellow and The New York Times Bestselling author of The Ask

“In the light of this insightfully nightmarish parable of the pervasive ravages of debt, Abernathy’s optimism, and the serene pace of McGhee’s prose, are stone cold chilling.” —Halle Butler, Granta Best Young American Novelist and author of The New Me