Perhaps, Watchlist finally suggests, we in the West can never be truly alone and unobserved.

To read the rest of the review, visit Sabotage Reviews.

In this diverse and daring fiction collection, writers of all stripes deal with the act of watching and being watched, subverting and challenging surveillance’s obvious connotations and raising questions about our intricate dance with privacy and transparency.

To read the rest of the review, visit Shelf Awareness

“What’s the difference between observation and surveillance?” Hurt began to wonder. “Between safely and benignly observing, and surveillance—a word that holds a deeper, more sinister meaning? When it comes to Facebook, there’s a lot of pictures of my kid on Facebook, of everybody’s kids, and who knows what’s going to happen with those? The children didn’t consent to put those on there. When you use the Guess My Age app, you sign off on letting Microsoft use your pictures for whatever they want, but what does that mean? There’s a comfort in being seen, but the line gets thin really fast.”

To read the rest of the interview, visit Los Angeles Magazine

Deji Olukotun’s contribution to the forthcoming collection Watchlist is now available to read on Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading blog. Watchlist editor Bryan Hurt provides an introduction:

“The world was not a fair place, and I was the one that helped people forget that fact.” So says Renton, the narrator of Deji Bryce Olukotun’s terrific and chilling story, “We Are the Olfanauts.” Renton is one of these invisible curators, a content moderator for Olfanautics, the “global pioneer in scented social media.” He is an Olfanaut. He defends humanity from its own worst self. From behind his desk, his Trunk dutifully attached to his face, Renton has seen, and smelled, it all: ritual dismemberment, rape, a nun who gets her head smashed in. Despite these horrors, Renton insists that he remains unaffected, unchanged. One of the story’s great triumphs, and great tragedies, is that it shows us in rich but subtle psychological detail just how wrong he is. Outside of the office, he acts with casual disregard, sometimes cruelty, to those around him. He has a man fired for no reason other than his own wounded ego; he fails to comfort his lover, another content moderator, who feels her own humanity slipping away.

His empathy is eroded by everything he’s seen. In many ways Olukotun’s story is novel-dense, and I feel like there’s a novel’s worth of material here to praise: his perfectly rendered and eerily prescient near-future world; his keen social commentary; his wonderfully complicated and morally complex characters; his smart and powerful use of the Prometheus myth. But my favorite thing about the story is the way it engages with and explores our sense of smell. Smell is the most immediate of all the senses, the most intimate. Researchers have found that there’s a link between intensity of feeling and intensity of smell. The future where smells are shared across cell phones and screens in order to intensify virtual experience is not far off; in fact, it’s already here. But as Olukotun shows us all of this sharing, all of this access and intimacy, comes at a cost.

Read “We Are the Olfanauts” on Recommended Reading.

…A boldly imaginative, diverse collection of 32 surveillance-themed stories from an international coterie of writers. …The varied cross-section of material is stylishly captured by each writer’s distinct voice and perspective.

To read the rest of the review, visit Publishers Weekly

It took some doing but I finally made a white dwarf star like they’d been making out in Santa Fe. I made mine in my basement because basements are the perfect place to compress time and space. I slammed together some very high frequency energy waves and—ZAP!—a perfect miniature white dwarf. Even though it was very small for its type, no larger than a pushpin, it was extremely dense and incredibly bright. The star was so bright that you couldn’t look directly at it. Had to look above or below or off to the side and squint. One time I set myself the challenge of just staring at it for thirty seconds. Got a big headache, huge mistake.

To read the rest of the excerpt, visit PEN America