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TELL THE MACHINE GOODNIGHT

Katie Williams

Pearl's job is to make people happy. Every day, she provides customers with personalized recommendations for greater contentment. She's good at her job, her office manager tells her, successful. But how does one measure an emotion?

Meanwhile, there's Pearl's teenage son, Rhett. A sensitive kid who has forged an unconventional path through adolescence, Rhett seems to find greater contentment in being unhappy. The very rejection of joy is his own kind of "pursuit of happiness." As his mother, Pearl wants nothing more than to help Rhett - but is it for his sake or for hers? Certainly it would make Pearl happier. Regardless, her son is one person whose emotional life does not fall under the parameters of her job - not as happiness technician, and not as mother either.

Told from an alternating cast of endearing characters from within Pearl and Rhett's world, Tell the Machine Goodnight delivers a smartly moving and entertaining story about relationships and the ways that they can most surprise and define us. Along the way, Katie Williams playfully illuminates our national obsession with positive psychology, our reliance on quick fixes and technology. What happens when these obsessions begin to overlap? With warmth, humor and a clever touch, Williams taps into our collective unease about the modern world and allows us see it a little more clearly.
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Published 2018-06-01 by Riverhead

Comments

IM Global TV To Adapt Sci-Fi Drama ‘The Happiness Machine' As Series. Read more...

Katie Williams's fierce moral intelligence sparks off the page... Generous, perceptive, intensely smart: Tell the Machine Goodnight is just the novel we need. --- Kirstin Valdez Quade, award-winning author of Night at the Fiestas

Allow me to introduce you to your new favorite writer - Katie Williams! In Tell the Machine Goodnight, she plunges into our obsession with technology and its effect on our lives and dreams, and emerges with miraculous gifts for us - she unwraps the present and the future. -- James Hannaham, PEN/Faulkner Award winner for Delicious Foods

The book feels like an extended episode of ‘Black Mirror,' and certainly has that show's taste for dark humor and high-concept philosophizing around our tech addition, though what raises it above another clever-clever slab of science fiction is that its characters are complex and contradictory and real. For better or worse, you care about them. The mirror may be dark in places, but it shines with a more human light. It's an entertaining read...What could have been simply a cutting satire - or thought experiment - about our tech dependence and craving for quick-fix pop psychology becomes something far warmer and funnier.... At the risk of broad generalization, science fiction - even literary science fiction - often sacrifices the science for the emotion, or the emotion for the science, yet Williams weaves the two together, and her novel shows how philosophical and sharply relevant fiction, this kind of fiction, can be in this fast-changing century - Williams offers a master class in not losing sight of the human element. --- New York Times (book review) Read more...

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