Watchlist

“Writers like T.C. Boyle and Cory Doctorow contributed to this surreal anthology of short stories that riff on our modern surveillance culture.” —Entertainment Weekly
With contributions from Etgar Keret, T.C. Boyle, Robert Coover, Aimee Bender, Jim Shepard, Alissa Nutting, Charles Yu, Cory Doctorow, and many more, Watchlist unforgettably confronts the question: What does it mean to be watched?
In Doctorow’s eerily plausible “Scroogled,” the US has outsourced border control to Google, on the basis that they Do Search Right. In Lincoln Michel’s “Our New Neighborhood,” a planned suburban community’s Neighborhood Watch program becomes an obsessive nightmare. Jim Shepard’s haunting “Safety Tips for Living Alone” imagines the lives of the men involved in the US government’s fatal attempt to build the three Texas Tower radar facilities in the Atlantic Ocean during the Cold War. Randa Jarrar’s “Testimony of Malik, Israeli agent #287690” is “a sweet and deftly handled story of xenophobia and paranoia, reminding us that such things aren’t limited to the West” (Sabotage Reviews) and Alissa Nutting’s “The Transparency Project” is a creative, speculative exploration of the future of long-term medical observation.
“Including work by literary heavy-hitters . . . the anthology considers the act and weight of watching and being watched . . . and in Watchlist, these see-to-know quests range from funny to terrifying.” —Los Angeles Magazine
“Smart, eclectic and carefully observed, this collection illuminates the darker corners within our culture and within our private lives.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“A boldly imaginative, diverse collection of 32 surveillance-themed stories from an international coterie of writers . . . The varied cross-section of material is stylishly captured by each writer’s distinct voice and perspective.” —Publishers Weekly