Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Biography, Literature & Literary studies

THE ATMOSPHERIANS

Alex McElory

This propulsive literary debut novel is about two lifelong friends - a social media star who's been harassed online and an enterprising yet failed D-list actor - who create The Atmosphere, a rigorous program designed to rid men of their toxic masculinity.

Sasha Marcus is an ambitious skincare influencer whose career falls apart after a heated exchange with a male fan. Broke, adrift, and being harassed by Men's Rights Activists, she agrees to join her oldest friend and a failed D-list celebrity, Dyson, in his plan to start a cult intent on reforming problematic men. In Dyson's eyes, The Atmosphere - its members called Atmospherians after the name often given to film extras - is an opportunity not only to help damaged men but also to protect the people these men have harmed. It is also a chance for Dyson to gain the celebrity status that he never received as an actor.

At The Atmosphere, however, Sasha struggles over how to treat the members. Their patriarchal baggage antagonizes her feminist impulses, and she is pulled between caring for them and wishing to punish them. How, in the end, do problematic people deserve to be treated?

Timely and sharply written, The Atmospherians is a darkly funny debut that powerfully explores toxic masculinity and the insidious nature of power - and society's role in combating them together.

Alex McElroy (they/them) grew up as an only child in rural New Jersey and moved across the country to Oregon at 18. They received their MFA from Arizona State University and their PhD from the University of Houston. Their writing has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Elizabeth George Foundation.

Available products
Book Published 2021-05-18

Comments

A droll tale of self-examination and self-help run amok, culminating in an unexpected conclusion. Highly recommended.

...This is exceptional writing: McElroy's world-building is artful, funny and bracingly resonant... "The Atmospherians" is full of visceral, often sickening emotion, as expressed through Sasha's impulsive shifts in mood and impressionability.

What wicked, utterly sublime, laugh-out-loud satire. With deft, shimmering prose, boundless in its capacity for capturing our most visceral desires, McElroy deciphers our age of wokeness and all its seductive kinks. This dazzling novel is the world, and we are living inside it.

Gutsy, hilarious, and fully saturated with the absurd spirit of our times, The Atmospherians is a novel about the tangle of capitalism, narcissism, and masculinity that have defined our cultural moment. McElroy is a master excavator of the murky innards that drive us, a satirist with an eye for the tender parts that make us tick.

McElroy's debut is as uncomfortable as it is thought-provoking. It takes on toxic masculinity, eating disorders, influencer culture, and the violence inherent in power dynamics without dragging or overreaching. Edgy, addictive, gruesome, and smart.

An ambitious, timely, and dazzling debut.

Alex McElroy's debut novel is wickedly funny, graceful in prose, and brilliant in execution. With its exploration and critique of contemporary culture in general, and masculinity gender performance specifically, The Atmospherians is a Fight Club for the Millennial Generation. I feel particularly bullish on this novel, and this writer.

Alex McElroy has written the novel of our age. The Atmospherians combines Mary Gaitskill's unflinching examination of beauty, cruelty, and power with a toxic masculinity rehabilitation center so outlandishly funny that it would fit perfectly in an episode of Nathan for You. This is a voice to get very excited about: darkly perceptive, stylistically bold, and terrifically, inimitably entertaining.

This notable debut makes hay with the miasma of contemporary culture.

The Atmospherians is a thrilling satire about wrecked reputations and flawed stabs at redemption, but it's also an earnest examination of the fragile place between community and mob... Alex McElroy draws an accurate portrait of this agitated era.

The Atmospherians is a marvel, a wonder, a gift. McElroy's characters glide across the page, in and out of love, and we see ourselves in their conflicts, their crucibles, and what they hold dear. Simply put, McElroy dazzles. This novel is dazzling.

Russia: AST

Rarefied, unstable, charged. This is the constant atmosphere in Alex McElroy's brilliantly bizarre novel. A sophisticated farce about alienation, The Atmospherians takes our absurd age seriously - which is to say it laughs, darkly, in its face.