Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind: A Novel

Molly McGhee

Okt. 2023 · Astra Publishing House

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A Best Novel of 2023 - Electric Literature and Largehearted Boy



"The novel is a magical-realist office drama infused with millennial anomie, and McGhee’s canny, often bittersweetly hilarious prose reads as if George Saunders infiltrated the Severance writers’ room."
—Rafael Frumkin, Washington Post

"This laugh-out-loud debut is a wildly imaginative, tender and piercing critique of the squeeze of capitalism."
—Xochitl Gonzalez, Good Morning America

"A scathing critique of capitalism that holds onto the humanity of its characters."
—Laura Zornosa, TIME

Jonathan Abernathy is a self-proclaimed loser. . . he’s behind on his debts, has no prospects, no friends, and no ambitions. But when a government loan forgiveness program offers him a literal dream job, he thinks he’s found his big break. If he can appear to be competent at his new job, entering the minds of middle class workers while they sleep and removing the unsavory detritus of their waking lives from their unconscious, he might have a chance at a new life. As Abernathy finds his footing in this role, reality and morality begin to warp around him. Soon, the lines between life and work, love and hate, right and wrong, even sleep and consciousness, begin to blur.

Molly McGhee touches on themes most people know all too well—the relentlessly crushing weight of debt, the recognition that work won’t love you back and the awkwardness of finding love when you are without hope. A workplace novel, at once tender, startling, and deeply funny, Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind is a stunning, critical work of surrealist fiction, a piercing critique of late-stage capitalism, and a reckoning with its true cost.

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Molly McGhee is from a cluster of unincorporated towns outside of Nashville, Tennessee. She completed her MFA in fiction at Columbia University, where, in addition to receiving a Chair’s Fellowship, she taught in the undergraduate creative writing department. She has worked in the editorial departments of McSweeney’s, The Believer, NOON, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Tor. Currently living in Brooklyn, her work has appeared in The Paris Review.