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A Novel
by Sarah Rose Etter
From an award-winning writer whose work Roxane Gay calls "utterly unique and remarkable" comes a surreal novel about a woman in Silicon Valley who must decide how much she's willing to give up for success—for fans of My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Her Body and Other Parties.
A year into her dream job at a cutthroat Silicon Valley start-up, Cassie finds herself trapped in a corporate nightmare. Between the long hours, toxic bosses, and unethical projects, she also struggles to reconcile the glittering promise of a city where obscene wealth lives alongside abject poverty and suffering. Ivy League grads complain about the snack selection from a conference room with a view of houseless people bathing in the bay. Start-up burnouts leap into the paths of commuter trains, and men literally set themselves on fire in the streets.
Though isolated, Cassie is never alone. From her earliest memory, a miniature black hole has been her constant companion. It feeds on her depression and anxiety, growing or shrinking in relation to her distress. The black hole watches, but it also waits. Its relentless pull draws Cassie ever closer as the world around her unravels.
When her CEO's demands cross an illegal threshold and she ends up unexpectedly pregnant, Cassie must decide whether the tempting fruits of Silicon Valley are really worth it. Sharp but vulnerable, funny yet unsettling, Ripe portrays one millennial woman's journey through our late-capitalist hellscape and offers a brilliantly incisive look at the absurdities of modern life.
"An explosive narrative of a woman coming undone as the world burns... . A deliciously bitter irony pervades... . A scathing look at corporate greed and its many dire consequences, this is deeply felt and cathartic." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A lurid, tense, and compelling novel... . Etter builds a lush and decaying landscape around a woman with an impossible affliction." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Sarah Rose Etter's Ripe begins with an evisceration of contemporary San Francisco, laid to waste by the tech industry... . [A] surreal book." —Bustle, Most Anticipated Books of Spring & Summer 2023
"A tremendous story ... Etter treads a fine line between gothic horror and dystopian fiction, snaring Cassie somewhere between our own lived reality and an uncanny, colorless future that is closer than it may seem... . Etter is at her best when carving firm lines around this anguish, a relentless haunting that articulates the pure horror of having a body and licensing others to own it." —The Sewanee Review
"[A] sharp and unsettling look into capitalist modern life." —Brit + CO
"Author of cult classic The Book of X, Sarah Rose Etter, comes back with another slightly twisted tale." —Her Campus, Most Anticipated Books of 2023
"Sarah Rose Etter is a wonder, and this novel is a knife to the heart." —Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties
This information about Ripe was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sarah Rose Etter is the author of the chapbook Tongue Party and The Book of X, winner of a Shirley Jackson Award for best novel. Her work has appeared in Time, Guernica, BOMB, the Bennington Review, The Cut, VICE, and elsewhere. She has been awarded residences at the Jack Kerouac House, the Disquiet International program in Portugal, and the Gullkistan in Iceland. She earned her BA in English from Pennsylvania State University and her MFA in fiction from Rosemont College. She lives in Los Angeles. For more info, visit SarahRoseEtter.com.
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