At once tender, startling, and deeply funny, JONATHAN ABERNATHY YOU ARE KIND is a gimlet-eyed reckoning with late-stage capitalism, a brilliant, ferocious novel for readers of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout and Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This.

JONATHAN ABERNATHY YOU ARE KIND
by Molly McGhee
‎ Atra, Fall 2023
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Jonathan Abernathy is screwed. Jobless, behind on his student loan payments, and a self-declared failure, the only thing Abernathy has in abundance is debt. When a government loan forgiveness program offers him a job he can do literally in his sleep, he thinks he’s found his big break. That is, until he finds himself auditing the dreams of white collar workers, flagging their anxieties and preoccupations for removal.
As Abernathy finds his footing in this new role, reality and morality begin to warp around him. Soon, the lines between life and work, love and hate, right and wrong, even sleep and consciousness, have blurred.

“Molly McGhee reminds me of absolutely no one. Here’s an original mind brimming over with invention and comic ferocity and a new world sensibility that serves to remind us what good hands the future of literature is in. I am hugely excited for everyone to read this mad, hilarious writer.” —Ben Marcus, Guggenheim Fellow and author of The Flame Alphabet

Molly McGhee is from a cluster of unincorporated towns outside of Nashville, Tennessee. She completed her M.F.A. in fiction at Columbia University, where, in addition to receiving a Chair’s Fellowship, she taught in the undergraduate creative writing department. She has worked in the editorial departments of McSweeney’s, The Believer, NOON, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Tor. Currently living in Brooklyn, her work has appeared in The Paris Review.