Dystopian Worlds with Diane Cook and Hilary Leichter

Diane Cook's A New Wilderness, is a wildly imaginative debut novel of a mother’s battle to save her daughter in a world ravaged by climate change, a book that is both prescient and suspenseful. Bea’s five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away, consumed by the smog and pollution of the overdeveloped metropolis that most of the population now calls home. If they stay in the city, Agnes will die. There is only one alternative: the Wilderness State, the last swath of untouched, protected land, where people have always been forbidden. Until now. Hilary Leichter's Temporary imagines a new kind of life. With eighteen boyfriends, twenty-three jobs, and one ghost who occasionally pops in to give advice: Temporary casts a hilarious and tender eye toward the struggle for happiness under late capitalism. A young woman fills increasingly bizarre placements in the search for steadiness and something, at last, to call her own. Whether it’s shining an endless closet of shoes, swabbing the deck of a pirate ship, assisting an assassin, or filling in for the Chairman of the Board, for the mythical Temporary “there is nothing more personal than doing your job.” Interviewed by Tim Weed