Flet

Set in a spaced-out future in which all cities have been evacuated after an ＂Emergency,＂ FLET is named for its female protagonist, an Administration flunky who begins to suspect that the Emergency may be a tool of sociopolitical oppression. An elegant entry in speculative fiction, Flet finds McSweeney slowing her distinctively hyperactive imagination down to the speed of narrative.

＂Sometimes you pick up a book and whole damn world opens up at your feet. ...Look, give Flet a try. It’s like a bad dream you can put a bookmark in.＂

-The Agony Column

＂Featuring a future so bright it’s sunburnt, Joyelle McSweeney’s exploration of a dystopian land not too dissimilar from our own overwhelms without wearing out its welcome; its overwhelming is part of the point. If anything, the perfect description for the book would either be one of its chapter titles, ’An Optic Parable, ’ or, perhaps, Tron as written by Allen Ginsberg.＂

-Adam O. Davis, Perihelion

＂Think Brave New World, 1984, or J. G. Ballard’s dark, prophetic sci-fi. Touted on its back cover as ’speculative fiction, ’ Joyelle McSweeney’s Flet could also be described as a poetic fever dream of the future.＂

-Amy Gerstler, Bookforum

＂A left-wing, sci-fi cautionary allegory on enslavement and the media, its tut-tuts ringing depressingly hollow and familiar-a dangerous, mystical, exalted intonation, a pounding, unremitting, wordplay-driven paean to social and animalistic evolution, particle- and fracture-based existence, cartography, and authorship.＂

-Micaela Morrissette, Jacket Magazine

Joyelle McSweeney earned her BA from Harvard and holds an MPhil in English Studies from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Brief reviews of hers have appeared in The Boston Review. She is a Professor in the Creative Writing Department at Notre Dame University.