NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A novelist discovers the dark side of Hollywood and reckons with ambition, corruption, and connectedness in the age of environmental collapse and ecological awakening—a darkly unsettling near-future novel for readers of Don DeLillo and Ottessa Moshfegh LONGLISTED FOR THE JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • Time • Los Angeles Times • The Philadelphia Inquirer • Vulture “A darkly satirical reflection of ecological reality.”—Time “Genius.”—Los Angeles Times “Wildly entertaining and beautifully written.”—LitHub East Coast novelist Patrick Hamlin has come to Hollywood with simple goals in mind: overseeing the production of a film adaptation of one of his books, preventing starlet Cassidy Carter's disruptive behavior from derailing said production, and turning this last-ditch effort at career resuscitation into the sort of success that will dazzle his wife and daughter back home. But California is not as he imagined: Drought, wildfire, and corporate corruption are omnipresent, and the company behind a mysterious new brand of synthetic water seems to be at the root of it all. Patrick partners with Cassidy—after having been her reluctant chauffeur for weeks—and the two of them investigate the sun-scorched city's darker crevices, where they discover that catastrophe resembles order until the last possible second. In this often-witty and all-too-timely story, Alexandra Kleeman grapples with the corruption of our environment in the age of alternative facts. Something New Under the Sun is a meticulous and deeply felt accounting of our very human anxieties, liabilities, dependencies, and, ultimately, responsibility to truth.
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“Throughout, Kleeman writes expressively about place and the manifold ways our lives are shaped by our imperiled environment.”
— Vulture
“A darkly satirical reflection of ecological reality.”
— Time“An unlikely amalgam of climate horror story, movie industry satire, and made-for-TV mystery.”
— New York Times“Wildly entertaining and beautifully written.”
— Literary HubBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Alexandra Kleeman is an NYC-based writer of fiction and nonfiction, and a PhD candidate in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. Her fiction has been published in The Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, Conjunctions, Guernica, and Gulf Coast, among other publications. Nonfiction essays and reportage have appeared in Tin House, n+1, and the Guardian. Her work has received scholarships and grants from Bread Loaf, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Santa Fe Art Institute, and ArtFarm Nebraska.
Marin Ireland is a voice artist who has won five Earphones Awards as well as the prestigious Audie Award for Best Female Narration in 2020. She is an award-winning actress known for her starring role in the Broadway show Reasons to Be Pretty, for which she was nominated for a Tony Award. She has appeared in a number of off-Broadway shows and television series, including Homeland, Unforgettable, The Killing, The Following, and others.