Archives par étiquette : The Gernert Company

HERE IN THE DARK d’Alexis Soloski

A young theater critic is drawn into a dangerous game that blurs the lines between reality and performance. A gripping debut from the New York Times theater critic.

HERE IN THE DARK
by Alexis Soloski
Flatiron, December 2023
(via The Gernert Company)

Vivian Parry likes the dark. A former actress, she now works as the junior theater critic at a major Manhattan magazine. Her nights are spent beyond the lights, in a reserved seat, giving herself over to the shows she loves. By day, she savages them, with words sharper than a knife. Angling for a promotion, Vivian reluctantly agrees to give an interview in which the conversation, with a stranger who seems to know her work, reveals secrets she thought she had long since buried. When her interviewer disappears soon thereafter, she learns from his devastated fiancé that Vivian was the last person to have seen him alive. When the police refuse to investigate, Vivian assumes the role of amateur detective. . As she nears the final act of this investigative ruse, she finds that the boundaries between theater and the real world are more tenuous and more dangerous than even she could have believed. Gripping, propulsive, and shot through with menace and dark glamour, HERE IN THE DARK takes us behind the scenes of New York theater, lifting the curtain on the lies we tell ourselves and each other.

Alexis Soloski is a prize-winning New York Times theater critic and a former lead theater critic at the Village Voice. She has taught at Barnard College and at Columbia University, where she earned her PhD in Theater. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

“From its very first page to its final revelation, Here in the Dark will possess you with a mix of acerbic wit and Highsmithian invention. You’ll be thrilled by the ways Soloski takes the novel of suspense and turns it into a meditation on seeing and being seen, knowing and being known, judging and being judged. » —Isaac Butler, author of The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act

« A moody, taut dose of noir, Here in the Dark is a poised, daring debut—the kind of novel I relish and can’t get out of my head, evoking the work of icons like Megan Abbott and Margaret Millar in its hypnotic prose and mesmerizing characters. Readers will not forget Vivian Parry—and they won’t want to. » —Alex Segura, bestselling author of Secret Identity

“Hitchcock meets a slippery metatheatrics of power, performance, desire, and escape. This is a novel – and a protagonist – who moves with a precious velocity, constantly choosing the most dangerous move and bringing us careening after.” —Jen Silverman, author of We Play Ourselves

THE TIME OF AI de Kate Crawford

A riveting, intellectual journey through the history of artificial intelligence and how it has shaped culture and the workplace.

THE TIME OF AI
How Generative AI is Changing Culture, Work, Politics and Time
by Kate Crawford
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2026
(via The Gernert Company)

A leading scholar of artificial intelligence explores the ways in which AI is shaping contemporary culture: how it will change our lives, for better and for worse, and what it means to live in this crucial, watershed moment. The book will be structured around five parts, each centered on a basic ingredient of human creation: Words, Images, Sounds, Motion, and Systems. The chapters contend with how each element is transformed by AI systems, and how the industries that depend upon it are changing, Asking what does this mean for us, as individuals and as a society, Professor Crawford posits that the best way to understand the cultural metamorphosis underway is to start with how AI makes things for us, and what we are making of it. In this way, the book speaks to changes at the foundational level of human creation, as well as addressing a dramatic series of simultaneous industrial shifts.

Kate Crawford is a leading international scholar of artificial intelligence. She is a Distinguished Professor at USC Annenberg in Los Angeles, a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, and the inaugural Visiting Chair for AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. She has founded multiple research groups including FATE at Microsoft Research, the AI Now Institute at New York University, and the Knowing Machines Group at the University of Southern California. Her last book, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (Yale University Press, 2021), won multiple awards including the prestigious Sally Hacker Prize, and was described by the Financial Times and New Scientist as one of the best books of the year.

BEARTOOTH de Callan Wink

BEARTOOTH is a profoundly moving portrait of the bonds of brotherhood.

BEARTOOTH
by Callan Wink
Granta, publication date TBD
(via The Gernert Company)

BEARTOOTH is the story of Thad and Hazen, two brothers from Yellowstone country. Fatherless, abandoned by their mother, and tired of eking out a livelihood poaching bears and chopping firewood, they reluctantly agree to help a mysterious, kilt-wearing Scotsman smuggle elk antlers out of the national park; it turns out rich folks building ski houses want them for chandeliers.

Callan Wink is the author of the story collection DOG RUN MOON (Random House, 2011), which was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and received a PEN/Hemingway Award Honorable Mention, and AUGUST (Random House, 2020), a novel. He has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His stories and essays appear widely, including in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, Playboy, Men’s Journal and The Best American Short Stories. In the warm months he lives in Livingston, Montana where he is a fly fishing guide on the Yellowstone River. In the winter he surfs in Santa Cruz, California.

JUST BENEATH THE SOIL de Clint Smith

Prize-winning author Clint Smith visits World War II sites around the world alongside survivors, descendants, and residents who have a particular relationship to each place, largely focusing on the experiences of groups of people whose stories often sit at the peripheries of the conflict’s dominant narrative, giving an intimate account of their lived experiences during the war.

JUST BENEATH THE SOIL
by Clint Smith
Random House, publication date TBD
(via The Gernert Company)

Photo by Carletta Girma

Clint Smith is a singular, once-in-a-generation talent. From the universal critical acclaim of his bestselling debut How The Word Is Passed to his widely read and influential articles at The Atlantic, each new piece of Clint’s writing transforms stories from our past into resonant living history. JUST BENEATH THE SOIL is the next step in Clint’s journey towards a fuller exploration of public memory.
In JUST BENEATH THE SOIL, Clint Smith trains his expert eye on a new time period: World War II. With his poetic, effortless prose, he brings us along as he interrogates what it means to have an “American perspective” on the most consequential and brutal global event of the past century. He spends time with one of the last Navajo Code Talkers, also a survivor of the infamous boarding schools for Native children. He sits with the still-living Korean “comfort women” who were subjected to sexual slavery at the hands of the Japanese military. He remembers his great uncle, a Black American veteran who signed up to fight for a country that subjected him to racial terror. He asks, why do we lift Germany up as an exemplar of remembrance for their willingness to build memorials, monuments, and museums dedicated to the Holocaust? And should we? Weaving together his powerful personal ethos, historical analysis, and cultural criticism, JUST BENEATH THE SOIL reveals that our history is not, in fact, buried deep, and instead lies just below our feet.
With his nuanced and thoughtful determination to look at the painful past that is his hallmark, Clint Smith unveils a new way to consider the history of World War II–in a Du Boisian spirit and tradition. Clint will take a global history and make it personal. He will also be the first Black author of a history of World War II not specifically about the experiences of Black people and soldiers during the war.
And as with everything he writes, accessibility to a broad audience and intellectual rigor are his goal. Clint puts it best: “I wrote it for the 15-year-old version of myself. This book represents a new way of thinking about the greatest conflict of the past century, and provides new eyes through which we might collectively understand it.”

Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times bestseller, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, the Stowe Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2021. He is also the author of Counting Descent, which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award.

READ. WRITE. OWN. de Chris Dixon

A passionate call for a new internet – one that wrests control from big tech and puts it back in the hands of the people, through the use of blockchain technology.

READ. WRITE. OWN. :
Building the Next Era of the Internet
by Chris Dixon
Random House, January 2024
(via The Gernert Company)

Though few outside a passionate subset of the tech world seem to realize it, the internet has arrived at an inflection point, in two respects. The first regards the history of the internet itself; the second, the technology that will power its future.
Evidence of the first inflection point is all around us. The top 1% of internet services, mostly run by an oligopoly of tech giants, account for 95% of web traffic. Content creators and small businesses depend upon algorithms over which they have no control, and that are subject to change at any time. A tiny handful of people make unilateral decisions with profound consequences for public discourse and who can participate in it, and increasingly for democracy itself. An even tinier handful has become unprecedentedly wealthy off our data, which–unless we want to opt out entirely–we have no choice but to turn over for free.
Chris Dixon remembers the halcyon days of the early internet–Web 1.0, as it’s known–when it was an open, egalitarian, and decentralized place, before it was intermediated by Big Tech. The next era, Web 2.0, brought transformative technologies like social media that connected billions of people–but it also centralized power in the hands of the companies that run them, with increasingly negative consequences for society as a whole.
For over five years, Chris has been advocating for a new kind of internet, which would combine the ethos of the early web while maintaining and innovating upon the benefits of corporate networks. Web3 (a term Chris has done more than anyone else to popularize) would be powered by blockchains, a new kind of computing that does everything corporate networks can do, and much more. They would return power and ownership to users, and foster innovation, precisely because their architecture makes it impossible for one person or company to seize control.
That brings us to the second inflection point. For many people, the past year has turned crypto into a dirty word–even a risible one. But that’s because cryptocurrency, which is but one use case of blockchains, has become in the public mind the province of speculators and grifters. The average person fails to understand that the true power and potential of crypto lies in blockchains themselves, not in the market for their tokens. It’s easy to forget that when the tech bubble burst in 2000, and the speculative frenzy that fueled the spectacular failure of companies like Pets.com and Webvan had subsided, many people thought it was the internet itself that had been overhyped. And yet that same era, and its immediate aftermath, gave us Amazon, Google, and Facebook–three of the most valuable companies in the world, which have fundamentally changed the way we live and work, but whose success has brought us to this crossroads.
There is a battle underway over the soul of crypto: “the computer v. the casino,” as Chris puts it. Sam Bankman-Fried was the figurehead for the latter camp. Chris is the unquestioned thought leader of the former. While the casino gets all the mainstream attention, the future of the internet is quietly being built. READ. WRITE. OWN. is its ZERO TO ONE–and having represented both, that’s not a comparison I make lightly.

Chris Dixon is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he has been since 2012. He founded and leads a16z crypto, which invests in web3 technologies through four dedicated funds with more than $7 billion under management. In 2022, he was ranked #1 on Forbes’ Midas List of the top venture capitalists. Previously, he founded and was CEO of two internet companies, SiteAdvisor and Hunch, which were acquired by McAfee and eBay, respectively. A programmer by training, he has a BA and MA in Philosophy from Columbia, and an MBA from Harvard. He tweets at @cdixon and blogs at Mirror.