Watchlist

February 23, 2015
This anthology presents a boldly imaginative, diverse collection of 32 surveillance-themed stories from an international coterie of writers. These selections, which include the supernatural, science fiction, noir fiction, and nonfiction, will appeal to a wide-ranging readership. The pulpy “Nighttime of the City” employs eerily cartoonish, trench-coated, fedora-donned characters who lurk around, then disappear and reappear. In “Sleeping Where Jean Seberg Slept,” a writer returns home to research the late actress, who was monitored by the government for supporting the Black Panthers. “The Relive Box” contains retinal laser beams that allow users to relive, but not revise, their past. “Safety Tips for Living Alone” is the real-life account of the collapse of Texas Tower No. 4, a poorly built off-shore radar facility used for spying on Russia. Additionally, there are falcons with human-like attributes that are pursued as spies, a neighborhood watch program that morphs into extreme surveillance, artwork that alters itself only when unattended, a delusional woman whose paranoia about government control becomes a fatal mistake, and a taxidermist whose vocation is ideal for spying. The varied cross-section of material is stylishly captured by each writer’s distinct voice and perspective.

March 1, 2016
A new anthology looks at surveillance and its effects through the lens of fiction. In 2013, PEN American Center issued a report called "Chilling Effects," tracing the influence of government surveillance on literature. Of the 500-plus writers surveyed, more than 25 percent had backed away from controversial material or "considered doing so." Clearly, the 32 contributors to "Watchlist" didn't get the memo. Gathering short fiction from, among others, T.C. Boyle, Aimee Bender, Lincoln Michel, Dana Johnson, and Jim Shepard, editor Hurt offers an array of responses to our culture of snooping, from the fantastic to the mundane. In Cory Doctorow's "Scroogled," a man passing through San Francisco International Airport is greeted by a sign declaring, "Immigration--Powered by Google": a terrifying conflation yet at the same time oddly credible. Juan Pablo Villalobos' "Terro(tour)istas" begins with that most mundane of contemporary acts, the liking of a Facebook post, before spiraling dangerously out of control. Most trenchant, perhaps, is Charles Yu's "Coyote," which imagines an organization in which the watchers are watching one another, noting small talk and lunch options, "a prepackaged chicken salad from Whole Foods" or a glass of the house red. "Carol," Yu writes, "if she is looking into your file, knows you are investigating Henry. And therefore investigating her, albeit indirectly. And now you know that she knows that. And you also know that she doesn't know that you know she knows." There you have it, the whole ridiculous loop in a nutshell, observation for its own sake, with no strategic goal. This is the world we've constructed, in which information is no longer power but a mechanism of social restraint. Or, as Hurt puts it, in a smart and personal introduction, "The more we know about each other, the less we actually know." Vivid examples of literature's power to help us understand our circumstances.

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