Reward System
Stories
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“Reward System is an exhilarating and beautiful book by an extraordinarily gifted writer. Reading these stories, I found myself thinking newly and differently about contemporary life.”
—Sally Rooney, author of Beautiful World, Where Are You
Julia has landed a fresh start—at a “pan-European” restaurant.
“Imagine that,” says her mother.
“I’m imagining.”
Nick is flirting with sobriety and nobody else. Did you know adults his age are now more likely to live with their parents than with a romantic partner?
Life should have started to take shape by now—but instead we’re trying on new versions of ourselves, swiping left and right, searching for a convincing answer to that question: “What do you do?”
Jem Calder’s Reward System is a set of ultra-contemporary and electrifyingly fresh fictions about work, relationships, and the strange loop of technology and the self. They are about a generation on the cusp: the story of two people enmeshed in Zooms and lockdowns, loneliness and love, devices and desires. Hyperaware but also deeply confused about who they are, Julia and Nick reveal the way we live now in a startling new light.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Calder debuts with a sharp collection that follows characters as they negotiate their relationships, self-presentation, and the banality of their routines. In the long multipart opener "A Restaurant Somewhere Else," a young woman named Julia celebrates a new sous chef job and an exciting romance with the restaurant's head chef, Ellery, all of which seems promising until she receives troubling messages about Ellery from her predecessor. In "Better Off Alone," Julia's ex, Nick, reconnects with their old friends while nursing an inferiority complex brought on by his dead-end copywriter job and continuing struggle to write fiction. Months later, in "Excuse Me, Do I Know You," Nick and Julia bump into each other. As they catch up, Julia doesn't share about her relationship, nor does Nick talk about his stalled attempts with writing. They part ways, but as Calder shows in "The Foreseeable," they stay connected over emails, texts, and FaceTime during the Covid-19 lockdown. While the choice to stretch out the narrative across several stories often diminishes their impact, it leaves room for Calder's insightful observations on the nature of romance and friendship in the age of right swipes and perfectly curated Instagram grids. There's plenty to dig into, even if the whole's a bit uneven.
