Reading taste-tuned novellas authored by algorithms.

Auto-logging encounters with beauty with a smartglasses app.

Installing a thermostat to maintain a constant psychological warmth at work.

Engineering a crush with a hormone-delivery system to preempt problematic attractions.

Donating a childhood friendship to someone who didn't have any through a memory transplant.




In Literary Devices for Coping, the technological and fantastical idiosyncratically shape key moments in close relationships. As characters in this collection grapple with issues of memory, jealousy and sanity, their efforts are assisted and complicated by gadgetry and artifice-often in ways that raise questions about what it means to be human.