The New World: A Novel

by Chris Adrian, Eli Horowitz

Overview

An innovative story of love, decapitation, cryogenics, and memory by two of our most creative literary minds

Jorie has just received some terrible news. A phone full of missed calls and sympathetic text messages seem to indicate that her husband, Jim, a chaplain at the hospital where she works as a surgeon, is dead. Only, not quite—rather, his head has been removed from his body and cryogenically frozen. Jim awakes to find himself in an altogether unique situation, to say the least: his body gone but his consciousness alive, his only companion a mysterious, disembodied voice.
In this surreal and unexpectedly moving work, Chris Adrian and Eli Horowitz spin a tale of loss and adjustment, death and reawakening. Simultaneously fabulist and achingly human, The New World finds Jorie grieving the husband she knew while Jim wrestles with the meaning of life after death. Conceived in collaboration with Atavist Books, The New World interrogates love and loss in the digital era.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374712228
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	05/05/2015
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	501 KB

About the Author

Chris Adrian is the author of The Great Night, Gob's Grief, The Children's Hospital, and A Better Angel. Selected by The New Yorker as one of its 20 Under 40, he lives in Brooklyn, New York. Eli Horowitz was the managing editor and then publisher of McSweeney's for eight years. The author of The Silent History, he is also the coauthor of The Clock Without a Face, a treasure-hunt mystery, and Everything You Know Is Pong, an illustrated cultural history of Ping-Pong, and his design work has been honored by I.D., Print, and the American Institute of Graphic Arts. He lives in San Francisco.

Chris Adrian is the author of Gob's Grief, The Children's Hospital, A Better Angel, and The Great Night. Selected by The New Yorker as one of their "20 Under 40," he lives in San Francisco, where he is a fellow in pediatric hematology-oncology.
Eli Horowitz was the managing editor and then publisher of McSweeney's. He is the co-author of The Clock Without a Face, a treasure-hunt mystery; Everything You Know Is Pong, an illustrated cultural history of Ping-Pong; and The New World, a collaboration with Chris Adrian, from FSG.

Editorial Reviews

Even to describe this book feels like blasphemy but I promise you'll exit agog, overjoyed, transformed.” —Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia! and Sleep Donation

“Jane and Jim have such basic human desires-they want to live, they want to be good-and The New World tracks how these basic pursuits can so quickly turn absurd, sad, and unforeseeably strange. It's a wild and fun book, yes, and also a precipitously imaginative and intelligent one. But maybe most importantly, its humor is profound and seems to come from the heart of an angel.” —Rivka Galchen, author of American Innovations

“I literally couldn't be a bigger fan of Chris Adrian's uniquely compassionate and wildly inventive voice. In The New World, Adrian pairs with Eli Horowitz to create a cryogenically intimate meditation on life and loss, and what it might mean to live forever.” —Nathan Englander, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

From the Publisher

05/15/2015
The theme of an individual waking up in the future after having his head cryogenically preserved is tricky to pull off. This novel, however, takes that idea in an original direction. Chapters alternating between Jane, the wife in the present, and Jim, the cryogenically preserved husband in the future create a lively contrast. Jim's challenge is adapting to a seemingly virtual future that requires him to forget the past. Jane's parallel struggle is dealing with the loss of Jim and her anger at the company that froze his head. Jane is angry because she had no idea that Jim was planning to be preserved. In a series of detailed flashbacks, the second part of the book reveals why Jane didn't know Jim's plans, while the third part illustrates the intensity of their marriage. VERDICT The arc of the story loops back on itself. What appeared to be a tale of a brave new world of the future is stillborn and reverts to an ontological examination of root causes. The abstract musing on disembodied identity as well as the present day narrative of human relationships are both unresolved; tepidly recommended for intrepid readers. [See Prepub Alert, "From Interactive to Straight Text with Chris Adrian and Eli Horowitz," 11/24/14.]—Henry Bankhead, Los Gatos Lib., CA

Library Journal

2015-04-01
Imagine a more benign Brave New World yoked with a short love story from a New Yorker back issue.Originally published as a digital novel, this collaboration of novelist Adrian (The Great Night, 2011, etc.) and former McSweeney's publisher Horowitz is an unwieldy hybrid of domestic romance and science fiction speculating on the prospect of immortality through decapitation. (And no, you didn't misread that.) Jane Cotton, a pediatric surgeon at a New York hospital, is having enough trouble coping with the death of her husband, Jim, a chaplain working at the same hospital. What makes matters worse is finding out that his corpse is missing its head, which has been cryogenically preserved by an enigmatic corporation called Polaris. Through an appropriately icy company spokesman named Brian, who apologizes to Jane for her "perceived loss," Jane finds out that Jim's frozen cranium is being preserved and stored for reattachment and restoration at some undetermined date in the distant future. The chapters concerning Jane's frantic quest for more information, legal redress, and (she hopes) Jim's head alternate for the most part with chapters that seem to be set in that aforementioned future in which Jim is in a painful struggle of his own as he adjusts to a new physical form while trying to retain whatever memories he has of his previous life. A disembodied voice named Alice tries to get Jim 2.0 to adjust to a world where money, among other things, "hasn't existed for a while." It's possible to interpret Adrian and Horowitz's gimmick as a scenario for a hypothetical breakthrough in biotechnology, along with its potential ramifications. It's also possible to interpret this new world as an old-school metaphor for reincarnation and its own hypothetical discontents. But until the book's latter two sections, which seem to move backward instead of forward in time, you don't care enough about any of the novel's characters to even begin considering its ideas. People do a lot of weeping in this book. Maybe that's meant to compensate for its lack of emotional depth.

Kirkus Reviews