kluge

If you and I are in the same =‘entertainment venue’ for this =‘stand-up comedy special’ and I am =‘my body’ and you are =‘my audience’ I run to you and shout your name into the dark, in the hope you are there.

Yes, you
=‘dear reader’
=‘attentive listener’.

This is a story about the end days of a tech company and its all-powerful owner, told in the style of a stand-up comedy special.

Prophetic, propulsive and absurdly entertaining, kluge is a workplace satire about artificial intelligence and the value of a body–and pip adam's best novel yet.

'An audacious, dazzling masterpiece. I love you, pip adam, put me on a leash and drag me to Hell.' —Hera Lindsay Bird

‘Funny, original and imaginative . . . No one else in New Zealand is writing books like this.’ —Philip Matthews, ReadingRoom

‘Part of kluge’s impact is that it reveals what is becoming increasingly sci and less -fi about our world. It is a cyber dystopia situated right at the edge of now.’ —Maya Jackson-Liew, The Listener

‘It smells like Silicone Valley and corporate culture and an iPhone that's gone hot from overuse . . . It ramps up the tension; the narrator's body and the endless barrage of words become more and more unhinged as the narrative crescendos towards its end.’ —Lucy Black, RNZ

'Amazing amazing amazing. This is the book pip adam was  =“born to write.” I'm reeling back in pleasure at language and laughing like a hyena with three broken legs in a darkness lit only by a wildfire approaching. TOO. MUCH. FUN. What a horrible hilarious perfectly sustained tonic.' —Carl Shuker

'utterly unmooring . . . a work of outrageous genius.’ —Jordy Rosenberg, author of Night Night Fawn

'meticulously crafted . . . a mind-bending and chilling artefact’ —Kerry Donovan Brown, author of Lamplighter

Note: this book is available in four different coloured covers.

pip adam is Tangata Tiriti and a fiction writer who lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. She is the author of four novels: Audition (2023), Nothing to See (2020), The New Animals (2017, winner of the Acorn Foundation Prize for Fiction), and I’m Working on a Building (2013); and the short story collection Everything We Hoped For (2010, winner of the NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction). Audition was published in Australia by Giramondo and in the UK by Peninsula Press. pip makes the Better off Read podcast.