Loneliness & Company, a debut novel from Adjunct Assistant Professor and alumna Charlee Dyroff ’20 (CC ’15), is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Publishing in May 2024.
Set in near-future New York, Loneliness & Company revolves around Lee, a recent college graduate and fellowship winner who finds herself embroiled in a covert government project that aims to “solve” loneliness in a dystopian society that claims to have erased it.
Lee is tasked with training AI how to be a friend, using the life of her outgoing roommate Veronika as a metric. Slowly, Lee begins to partake in more and more dangerous experiences for the sake of gathering data for the AI.
“Loneliness & Company is a stunning novel, full of lyricism, brilliance, and quiet integrity, boldly tackling the most complex philosophical ideas,” writes Adjunct Associate Professor Lara Vapnyar. “How do you define loneliness that plagues all of us, increasingly so? Is it a personal affliction or an existential condition? I’ll be thinking about this novel for a long time.”
According to Associate Professor Wendy Walters, “In Dyroff’s deeply original novel, it is possible to see the future. Loneliness & Company invites us into a techno-laden world that is not so far from our own. A riveting and unforgettable story of ambition that also reminds us how essential friendship is.”
Charlee Dyroff is originally from Boulder, Colorado. Her work has appeared in Lapham’s Quarterly, Guernica, Gulf Coast, and The Best American Food Writing of 2019.
