Anna Wiener
An Instant New York Times Best Seller
"[Wiener] is here to fill out our worst-case scenarios with shrewd insight and literary detail . . . Wiener is a droll yet gentle guide . . . The real strength of Uncanny Valley comes from her careful parsing of the complex motivations and implications that fortify this new surreality at every level, from the individual body to the body politic."
—Lauren Oyler, The New York Times Book Review
"Extraordinary . . . Wiener’s storytelling mode is keen and dry, her sentences spare―perfectly suited to let a steady thrum of dread emerge."
—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
"Equal parts enchanting and subversive . . . [Wiener's] account of living inside the Bay Area bubble reads like HBO's Silicon Valley filtered through Renata Adler; Wiener is a trenchant cultural cartographer, mapping out a foggy world whose ruling class is fueled by empty scripts: 'People were saying nothing, and saying it all the tine.' The book's author does the very opposite."
—Lauren Mechling, Vogue
"Beautifully observed . . . Someone like Wiener makes for a good spy in the house of tech . . . Wiener excels at . . . the texture of life for people in a particular and pivotal time and place."
—Laura Miller, Slate
"I've never read anything like Uncanny Valley, which is both a searching bird's-eye study of an industry and a generation, as well as an intimate, microscopic portrait of ambition and hope and dread. Anna Wiener writes about the promise and the decay of Silicon Valley with the impossibly pleasurable combination of a precise, razored intellect and a soft, incandescent heart. Her memoir is diagnostic and exhilarating, a definitive document of a world in transition: I won't be alone in returning to it for clarity and consolation for many years to come."
―Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
"Like Joan Didion at a startup."
―Rebecca Solnit, author of Call Them By Their True Names
“A rare mix of acute, funny, up-to-the-minute social observation, dead-serious contemplation of the tech industry’s annexation of our lives, and a sincere first-person search for meaningful work and connection. How does an unworn pair of plain sneakers ‘become a monument to the end of sensuousness’? Read on.”
―William Finnegan, author of Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
"Eschewing the caffeinated, self-referential keenness that defined the decade’s online writing, Wiener is cerebral and diagnostic in her observance of escalating corporate surveillance."
—Pete Tosiello, The Paris Review