

Same Same
Author: Peter Mendelsund
Narrator: Euan Morton
Unabridged: 13 hr 43 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Random House Audio
Published: 02/05/2019
Categories: Fiction, Dystopian, Satire, Science Fiction
Author: Peter Mendelsund
Narrator: Euan Morton
Unabridged: 13 hr 43 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Random House Audio
Published: 02/05/2019
Categories: Fiction, Dystopian, Satire, Science Fiction
Peter Mendelsund is alive to the ghosts of writers and artists who precede him, he is crowded by Ted Talkers. There is hardly room on the page for him to write. This feeling of claustrophobia and self-doubt permeate this inventive yet exhausting novel. His setting one Jorge Luis Borges would love a......more
Here be shenanigans. This is the kind of novel you don’t see around as much anymore, a metafictional send-up of the experience of writing, a book whose favorite theme is itself. You’re not allowed for one whole minute to forget that what you’re reading is not the thing itself but a representation of......more
“Same Same reaches literary heights. . . . Mendelsund’s first novel manages to be breezy and profound in equal measure. That balance is—as the programmers say—a feature and not a bug. . . . In using nonsensical jargon to expose the hollow core of the global Big Ideas industry, Mendelsund has produced—or perhaps reproduced—something entirely satisfying. Same Same is a substantial book about emptiness. It reminds us that there’s no here here unless we create it ourselves. . . . [And it includes] one of the most perfectly tuned passages of fiction I’ve read in a very long time.” —Andrew Ervin, The New York Times Book Review
“A deeply inventive and wonderfully strange novel that takes dead aim at the question: does it matter if something's real?” —Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation
“[Mendelsund] has a grand time serving up what would seem to be an extended metaphor for creativity . . . that would do Brian Eno proud. Mendelsund's novel of ideas makes a neat bookend to Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2 as a study of creation in the age of the smart machine.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Most books aspire to imitate life; this one succeeds in imitating literature. A fractal abyss of copies copying copies, this brilliant and hilarious full-size replica of a novel exposes the limits of conventional narratives by miraculously transmuting repetition into difference and, ultimately, something unique.” —Hernán Diaz, author of In the Distance
“Rewarding. . . . Absurdist, uncanny metafiction about the nature of identity, individuality, and authorship in an era of rapid technological advancement. . . . Comically disturbing.” —Publishers Weekly
“Like an ever-shifting Rubik’s Cube, Mendelsund’s narrative blends influences and genres at will: it begins as an sf dystopia, unfurls like a mystery, and includes some deeply insular sections reminiscent of the late David Markson. . . . Mendelsund has created a dense, complex, and rewarding novel that explores the ever-hazier distinctions between copying and creating, between ourselves and our ubiquitous devices, and between what is real and what is simulated.” —Booklist