“A Handmaid‘s Tale for the Post-Truth-AI-Surveillance Era.” —Suzanne Treister, author of Hexen 2.0.
THE GINNY SUITE
by Stacy Skolnik
Montez Press, June 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)
A mysterious global syndrome is affecting women, causing symptoms of submissiveness and aphasia. While the number of sufferers grows, so does our protagonist’s paranoia—of the media, her doctors, and her husband. In the age of misinformation, AI, and surveillance, THE GINNY SUITE asks how much—and who—we’re willing to sacrifice in the name of progress.
“Perversely brilliant, fearlessly inventive, The Ginny Suite beautifully illustrates the horror of being a thinking person inside of a body and culture rushing toward the graveyard.” —Brad Phillips, author of Essays and Fictions
“THE GINNY SUITE is a perfect hell of a book: a gossipy stylish mystery that’s both petty and profound. I love how its paranoias and insecurities tip lushly into plot: is the lyric condition of poetry a pathology? Is dissociation a radical response to the lived conditions of patriarchy, or is it patriarchy hacking your brain into submission? What if, instead of self-diagnosing through google, your search history was used to diagnose you, and form the basis of covert treatment? Its prose moves seamlessly from the lush to the blunt, awash with glitching pronouns, horny ennui, sci-fi intrigue and tender girlish digital fantasies. I adored it.” —Daisy Lafarge, author of Paul
“THE GINNY SUITE is formally innovative, a great read.” —Constance DeJong, author of Modern Love
Stacy Skolnik is the author of the poetry collection mrsblueeyes123.com (self-released, 2019), the chaplet Sparrows (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2023), the workbook From the Punitive to the Ludic: Prompts for Writing Public Apologies (with Thomas Laprade as Montez Press Radio, KAJE, 2022), and the chapbook Rat Park (with Katie Della-Valle, Montez Press, 2018). Her writing has been featured in journals and magazines such as Lambda Literary, The Operating System, Fjords, and Pfeil, among others. She is a cofounder and co-director of Montez Press Radio, the Lower East Side-based broadcast and performance platform.
Meet Frank Szatowski, a widowed UPS driver in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. He has spent the last three years estranged from his adult daughter Maggie—but as our story opens, Maggie calls home to announce that she’s getting married, and she wants her father to walk her down the aisle.
Harvard University: instead of being conscientious, hard-working students, members of the elite fraternity Alpha Phi Omega have wild parties and set each other high-risk dares. Everyone wants to be part of the hype, and film their challenge live for the Whispers app: Noktura. But what starts as a game spins out of control when Willow, Benedict, Deepika and Jacob find Henry’s body during a team challenge at Langdell Hall. They are shocked – but relieved too: all four have a guilty secret that’s somehow linked to Henry.
Book 1: GLÄNZENDE ZEITEN
Book 2: GROSSE HOFFNUNG
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