Tag: Soft Skull Press

Q&A with Colin Winnette: ‘Users’ and the Underbelly of Tech

by Charlie Barton

Posted on by Zack Ravas

Colin Winnette’s latest novel, Users (271 pages; Soft Skull Press), is much less about virtual reality than the creative minds behind it. The protagonist Miles works at a VR firm as the lead creative and is tasked with hatching up new ideas for future products. He’s well-respected and well-paid, the creator of Ghost Lover, a popular simulation in which the user is haunted by a former flame. His personal life, however, is much less secure: his marriage is precarious, and his children can be difficult and unrelatable. Miles’s anxiety is spurred by the arrival of death threats. But the pressure […]

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‘King of Joy’ by Richard Chiem: Millennial Malaise

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Posted on by Zack Ravas

King of Joy (176 pages; Soft Skull Press) floats out from under a narcotic haze. The first novel from Richard Chiem follows the recent reissue of his story collection, You Private Person, and expands on that book’s knack for exploring millennial ennui. As King of Joy opens, lead character Corvus finds herself in a purgatorial place; on the run from a painful past, she’s spent the last year residing in a secluded woodland manor with a host of other young women and their employer, a pornographer named Tim. Her days are loosely spent in a druggy stupor, socializing with her […]

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Peering through the Haze of Digital Commotion: ‘All This Life’ by Joshua Mohr

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Posted on by editor

Is loneliness the de facto spiritual condition of the Information Age? This is the central question that seems to loom over All This Life (Soft Skull Press; 294 pages), the latest novel from Bay Area author Joshua Mohr. In the book, Mohr trains a scathing lens upon our 21st century culture, one that craves personal connection and yet seems to have forgotten the value of face-to-face interactions, opting instead for a constant stream of YouTube videos, live Tweets, and Facebook status updates. “All that matters is content. New content. More content.” The setting is San Francisco circa 2013, a city […]

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Getting Out from the Daily Rut: Joshua Mohr’s ‘Fight Song’

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Suburban harmony is under attack in Joshua Mohr’s new novel, Fight Song (Soft Skull Press, 272 pages). The book is a humorous ride through one week in the life of a middle age man who is going off the rails. But it’s also a critical look at how suburbia has been taken over by gadgets and corporations, as well as the stasis that traps people inside their jobs and within their gated communities. Bob Coffen is one of those people. When we meet him, he’s just trying to bike from his job to his boring home. He’s been working at […]

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Poetry Karaoke, the Russian River, and Murder: Q&A with Bart Schneider

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In his new book, Nameless Dame (Soft Skull Press; 296 pages), novelist and poet Bart Schneider picks up where he left off in The Man in the Blizzard, his 2008 crime novel about pothead Minnesota private eye Augie Boyer and police Detective Bobby Sabbatini. In his bouncy if violent, weed- and verse-filled sequel, Schneider brings Augie back to his roots in the Bay Area (roots Schneider shares with the narrator), taking him on a visit to Sabbatini and his family in the bucolic splendor (and weirdness) that is western Sonoma County, with its redneck pot farmers and hippie searchers, to […]

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