RETRO

A high-concept, commercial novel about a young, out-of-work actress who manages to score a job as a time travel agent for a company called Retro.

Ash's life as a member of Retro begins, she takes bachelorette parties to live out their cowboy-romance fantasies in the Old West and throws "the '20s for your twenties" birthday parties at speakeasies; she smiles politely as rich Wall Street guys give prospecting a shot in the Gold Rush. It's all thrilling, outrageous, and totally surreal. Bygone America is just a Retro Metro ride away.

Despite Ash's tendency toward cynicism, she finds herself swept up in her dazzling new job. She isn't the actress she always dreamed she'd be, but isn't this acting after all, and isn't this life better? However, it turns out this new life comes at a cost to her real life and as her memory and her relationship to time itself, threatens to unravel her, she confronts an unsettling truth: "escaping" into the past was never really an escape at all, and Retro's odd billionaire founder and CEO, Ro Temple, has ideas for Ash's future.

Jessica Goldstein is a journalist and humorist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vulture, Marie Claire, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and more. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, she was born and raised New Jersey and currently lives in Washington, D.C.