Loneliness & Company
United States

Loneliness & Company

by Charlee Dyroff

Summary

In a near-future America where loneliness has supposedly been eliminated from society’s vocabulary, Lee expects her academic success to secure her a prestigious job at a leading technology corporation. Instead, she finds herself in a struggling, half-abandoned New York City, working for an obscure company with an unusual mission: training an artificial intelligence named Vicky to understand friendship. Initially, Lee approaches the task as a research problem, studying human interactions and observing the lively social life of her roommate, Veronika. But when she discovers that her employer is part of a secret government project designed to combat a mysterious resurgence of loneliness, her ambition takes over. Determined to produce results, Lee begins pursuing increasingly risky experiences to teach the algorithm what genuine human connection looks like. As her research becomes entangled with her own emotional life, she must confront the limits of technology and her understanding of intimacy. With wit and unsettling imagination, Dyroff explores isolation, ambition and the human need to belong in an increasingly technology-driven world.

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Charlee Dyroff
Charlee Dyroff

Charlee Dyroff is an American novelist and writer originally from Boulder, Colorado. She earned a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University, where she studied creative writing, and has since developed a distinctive literary voice that combines social observation, humour and imaginative speculation. Her essays and fiction have appeared in publications including Slate, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Lapham’s Quarterly and Ploughshares. Her food writing was also featured in The Best American Food Writing 2019. Dyroff made her fiction debut with Loneliness & Company (2024), a speculative novel exploring artificial intelligence, social isolation and the human desire for connection. The book imagines a near-future society attempting to solve loneliness through technology, raising questions about whether friendship and emotional intimacy can ever be reduced to data and algorithms.

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Published
2024
Author
Charlee Dyroff