Description
This is the story of Olga, a retired mathematician, and Mateo, a college student passionate about robotics, and their plot to influence Google.
"This book has excited me more than any that I have read this year."-Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
"This is a beautifully written, endlessly provocative meditation on humanity's relationship to technology, monopoly, memory and fate."- Dave Eggers, author of The Circle and The Every
After a chance encounter at the public library, two new friends begin to meet up regularly. Together they decide to submit an application for Google sponsorship to an elite technology-training program. Hoping to stand out, they frame their submission as a direct appeal to the "conscience" of the seemingly all-powerful corporation.
Olga, a retired entrepreneur, and Mateo, a college student, find unexpected connection and solace in their conversations. Ideas and arguments open into personal stories as they debate the possibility of free will, the existence of merit, and the role of artificial intelligence. They ask the most basic and important of questions: What does it mean to be human in a reality shaped by data and surveillance? Is there still space for empathy and care? What could we be, what could we build, if we used our resources in different ways?
*Co-op available
*Galleys available
*National print campaign: Will pursue reviews in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, San Francisco Chronicle, Elle Magazine, Jacobin, Guernica, and elsewhere. Focus on literary, literature in translation, and women's media.
*Pursuing excerpts in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, n + 1 and elsewhere.
*Online/social media campaign: Outreach to Words Without Borders, The Rumpus, Oprah Daily, NPR.com, as well as promotion on City Lights's social media accounts: * Instagram (50K followers ), Facebook (58K followers) and Twitter (136K followers)
*Tour info: Will pursue virtual events with bookstores with interest in literature in translation, with translator and author joining us.
*Bookseller/Library promotions: We're pursuing nominations for IndieNext and we are open to other bookseller and library promotions that are appropriate for the book.
Endorsements - pursuing: William Gibson, Kelly Link, Charlie Jane Anders, Tim Maughan, Lauren Oyler, Anna Weiner, Dave Eggers, Ian McEwen, Sarah Pinsker, Rana el Kaliouby, Nick Bostrum, Andrew Ng, Fei-Fei Li, Andrej Karpathy, Robert Sapolsky, Jaron Lanier, Trevor Paglen, Ellen Ullman
About the Author
Belen Gopegui burst onto the Spanish literary scene in 1993, bowling over critics with her debut, La escala de los mapas [The Scale of Maps, City Lights, 2011], which was hailed as a masterpiece. She has since published six more novels, stories, young people's fiction, and screenplays, and several of her books have been adapted for cinema. This is her second translation into English. Gopegui was born, and lives in, Madrid, Spain.
Mark Schafer is an award-winning literary translator and visual artist, and a senior lecturer at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where he teaches Spanish. He has translated works by authors from around the Spanish-speaking world, including David Huerta, Virgilio Pinera, Alberto Ruy Sanchez, and Belen Gopegui's La escala de los mapas [The Scale of Maps, City Lights, 2011]. Schafer is a founding member of the Boston Area Literary Translators Group. He lives in Roxbury, Massachusetts.
Reviews
Praise for Stay This Day and Night With Me by Belen Gopegui and translated by Mark Schafer:
"Belen Gopegui brandishes her pen as a sword as she charges straight at one of the tech giants. . . . The release of this English translation is timed perfectly. It adds a literary dimension and intellectual depth to an escalating discussion previously mined by writers such as William Gibson (Neuromancer) and Jennifer Egan (The Candy House), both standout examples of fiction reflecting the relationship between technology and society."-Lanie Tankard, The Woven Tale Press
"Gopegui issues an intellectual challenge to Google, and to her readers. What, she asks, do we know that AI cannot - and is it too late to start valuing that knowledge more? . . . Exciting and bracing."-Lily Meyer, NPR
"Gopegui leavens the high-mindedness with a cool sense of irony, and shines with her succinct insights on the similarities between humans and AI...Readers will be intrigued."-Publishers Weekly
"With the rise of ChatGPT, questions about the human relationship with technology are once again on the minds of many. In this book-which revolves around Olga and Mateo, a retiree and a student who hatch a scheme to earn a Google sponsorship for a technology-training program-Gopegui explores the iterations and nuances. Empathy, corporate capitalism, and Google itself come under the microscope in Olga and Mateo's conversations."-Alta Magazine
"Unique and fascinating, Stay This Day and Night With Me pushes beyond the political and philosophical debates of its characters to deliver a much needed dose of humanity in the face of emerging corporate, unknowable, and inhuman intelligence."-Tim Maughan, author of Infinite Detail
"Two people who love robots meet in a library. A philosophical dialogue ensues. The writing is delicate, strange, and strangely riveting: Gopegui slides between registers and scales with uncommon grace. This is a book about two human beings and also what it means to be a human being in the algorithmic age. This is a book about Google, capitalism, and the ordinary unhappiness of being alive."-Ben Tarnoff, author of Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future
"A thrillingly unclassifiable book of ideas about the inherent tension between being an individual while also being part of a community-and whether one's individual or communal identity is ever truly primary. Gopegui's novel is a study of empathy and human connection in a time of algorithms and tech giants, extending curiosity not only towards her very human characters, but also towards the corporate machinery that governs their lives, and the lives of her readers." -Adrienne Celt, author of End of the World House
"With the Digital Age as the backdrop, Gopegui creates a novel that is as analog as they come: a conversation between two people, their philosophical debates and tender connection. As a result, she crafts a potent interrogation of the status of our modern life."-Bennard Fajardo, Politics and Prose Bookstore, Washington, D.C.
Book Information
ISBN 9780872868939
Author Belen Gopegui
Format Paperback
Page Count 188
Imprint City Lights Books
Publisher City Lights Books
