A lossless file contains all its original data, compressed to allow for full reconstruction. But a lossless life is a life unlived, with nothing to reconstruct. Without loss, there is no living—only bare existence. Agony and ecstasy: two poles of human experience. And everything in between… where does it go. In Katherine Martin’s debut novella, a person can donate it all to AnTech, where it will be seeded among the company’s android products. Our augmented narrator spends his work days performing this process; he is what is known as a Transferrant. But he too has lived…and lost. Data is gone: fragmented, corrupted, degraded—the remaining files disoriented between the covers of this slim volume. His wife is gone, his cat is missing. He doesn’t quite know who he is anymore—severed from the imprint of his early years by the neural implant required for his job, he is now being divested of everything that held meaning afterwards.

Mr. Transferrant’s wife, Jun, is adrift. Or is she. She may be missing what she gave away, or what’s been taken, or perhaps: what was never there. At the core of these jumbled files lies the concept of a trade of equal value. An eye for an eye. Pain for art. A donation but with a catch: something in return. Surrendering your collected self for freedom from unbearable loneliness. But it seems like wishful thinking to believe that you will somehow ‘live on’ as useful fragments embedded in AnTech’s products. It sounds more like a corporate trap for the ones who’ve reached the end of the line—a commodified alternative to suicide.

The increasing digitalization of our lives gradually erases the line between our memories and our data. Apps remind us of past times—our personal history algorithmically selected and packaged as special moments shoved in front of our faces, unbidden and unwanted. On this day, 10 years ago. Is it really me? I don’t think it’s a lossless file, so… Your memory is unreliable—your devices know you better than you know yourself. Our apps perform the recollective labor of our damaged, eroded minds. At least, that is what we are not so subtly being taught to believe.

The implication is that the AnTechs of the world will one day soon convince us that our bodies, our lives, are of less value than the data that has been mined from them. So, why continue in this inexorable march toward death? We can relieve you of all that existential pain. Why not avoid future suffering by making that donation? We will take your cognitive capital and reinvest it where it will yield immeasurable returns. For your part, it will be a selfless act, a truly philanthropic gesture: an investment in a future of posthuman perfection! Don’t you want to be one small part of that future? Don’t you??

Published by Calamari Archive, 2026 (available through Asterism)

We are all awaiting catastrophe. Though our minds may not accept it, we feel it in our bones: the end of our modern way of life is coming. When will it happen? How will it arrive? Will we live through it, or will we all be instantly obliterated? In Ivy Grimes’s novella, disaster comes by way of solar storms that disrupt the electrical grid and drain all the batteries, stripping society of its modern technological conveniences. Luckily for Grimes’s narrator Jane, though, she is visiting her grandmother in the woods at the time, so she is not trapped in the city where she lives. Grandma is a special person, though Jane is still learning exactly how special. The two squabble over typical intergenerational differences, but also over Grandma’s vague but persistent expectations for Jane, who bristles in response. They are both stubborn and contrary, but it’s obvious that a strong bond ties them together.

The story revolves around a small group of neighbors who share resources and offer mutual aid in the wake of the disaster. In addition, though, each household carries its own emotional baggage, which spills open and seeps into the community. Tragedy and dark secrets intermingle. While Grandma looms large, she is often in the background, tending to esoteric duties; however, the sense pervades that she knows most of what goes on and exerts influence over much of it.

With deft subtlety, Grimes weaves supernatural elements into the narrative. Inspired by Russian and Alpine folklore, she cleverly introduces threads from specific tales and pagan myths. As Jane narrates, we feel her experience of moving with one foot in contemporary ‘reality’, while her other foot struggles to find its balance in the world beyond. For Jane, like Grandma, is also special. She has a role to play in a crucial transitory process, should she choose to accept it. We all know catastrophe brings death, and the one in this book is no different. There is a lot of death, but people learn to cope, often in surprising ways. Grimes also has a knack for humor, which tempers the book’s darker themes. It’s a story that, while it seems to exist outside of time, is very much relevant to our present.

Note: Thank you to Violet Lichen Books for sending me a review copy.

A tripartite journey—both geographical and emotional—Daniel Williams’s debut novel The Edge of the Object follows the highs and lows of a young Englishman living in France for a period of six months. The book as an object is striking to behold: three perfect-bound A4-sized volumes smartly dressed in the colors of the French flag and packaged in a screenprinted and letterpressed case—all designed and produced by Tim Hopkins of London’s The Half Pint Press. The prose found within is equally well crafted, with the book’s design complementing it nicely.

Taking cues in part from the work of Georges Perec, this novel is simultaneously a celebration of French culture as seen through the Francophilic eyes of a post-collegiate young man, and a keen look into the headspace of a person far from home, isolated by way of a language barrier he is only partly able to breach and yearning for human connections beyond what he often feels capable of. An erstwhile photographer, the unnamed narrator feels alternately liberated and hamstrung by the absence of his Leica—the camera offering a valid excuse to be present at a remove while also preventing true engagement in any given experience. This tension resulting from being camera-less clings to the narrative, as we watch the narrator struggle to engage with his surroundings—taking as many steps backward as forward in this endeavor—as he moves from place to place.

Williams writes with exacting precision—mapping the interior emotional journey of his narrator as carefully as he describes his geographical progress through France. He has a journalistic eye for detail, snapping word-images in lieu of photos and placing scene after scene in front of the reader with aplomb. Moments of wry humor and painterly passages of the French countryside counter the heaviness of themes of left-behind love and debilitating incidents of migraine headaches. Also tempering the at times somber subject matter, the pages of the first and third sections of the book are graced with striking calligrams—images sculpted from the words on the page and representative of a central theme or object on each page. These calligrams gently encourage the reader to slow down or speed up accordingly, keeping step with the pacing of the story.

The first part of the book is written in second-person point-of-view—unusual but appropriate to the experience of being in a rural area of a foreign country, surrounded by its natives, yet only with a workmanlike grasp of its language. The central character is living in a falling-apart cottage, not much more refined than a cave (and perhaps even less dry). Whenever nature calls, he must journey through a warren of gardens to reach the privy, and—adding to the inconvenience—the only running water for washing up is also located outside. It is hard living, made even harder by his isolation.

In the second part, the point-of-view segues to first person as our man reaches the big city of Paris and makes contact with the first of a series of friends he will spend time with over the coming weeks. Gone are the calligrams in favor of straightforward text blocks, as the focus in narration begins to point outwards in concert with the narrator’s efforts to interact more with the people around him. He soon meets up with a friend’s indie pop group on tour and joins them for a number of club dates around the country, during which he becomes interested in a woman whose feelings toward him are slippery at best.

The final part of the book returns to calligrams and the second-person distance, as the narrator backtracks to his lonely cottage existence. Here he comes to a decision about one last adventure to embark upon before his trip comes to a close. This jaunt provides a suitable denouement to his time in France, as we feel this fellow we’ve traveled so closely with start winding down and perhaps pine a bit harder for home. And indeed, the last page finds him back in England with his camera once again in hand—facing a future unknown but now fertilized with a rich new layer of experience from which to grow, perhaps out beyond the self he became too much of while away.

And yet, while these six months have taken you further from the excesses of the world than ever before, they have plunged you into an excess of time, of memory, and of yearning. If anything, you have become too much yourself.

[Limited print copies of the book may still be available, and the ebook has recently been released. Details at The Edge of the Object site. See also Williams’s essay in The Quietus on Perec’s novella A Man Asleep and its connection to this novel.]