Stay This Day and Night With Me

"This is the story of Olga, a retired mathematician, and Mateo, a college student passionate about robotics, and their attempt to influence Google. They meet to ponder ideas such as free will, merit, and the possibility of synthetic humans, and together they craft an extremely unorthodox job application, a direct appeal to a seemingly all-powerful corporation. Tension grows as their relationship becomes strained due to ideological differences, and while Olga confronts a terminal illness, Mateo plans an attack on Google. Author Belâen Gopeguâi has been compared to Cervantes, Nabokov and Borges. Here, she offers a literary equivalent of My Dinner with Andre, creating a hermetic, compelling world in which two characters engage in an extended conversation about the rights, roles, and obligations of humans whose choices are determined by algorithms and surveillance. As Olga and Mateo examine the possibility of what it might take to confront something as all-prevailing as Google, they ask the most basic and important of questions: What could we be, what could we build, right now, if we used our resources in different ways?"--

About the author

Belén Gopegui burst onto the Spanish literary scene in 1993, bowling over critics with her debut, La escala de los mapas [The Scale of Maps, City Lights, 2011], which was hailed as a masterpiece. She has since published six more novels, stories, young people’s fiction, and screenplays, and several of her books have been adapted for cinema. This is her second translation into English. Gopegui was born, and lives in, Madrid, Spain.
Mark Schafer is an award-winning literary translator and visual artist, and a senior lecturer at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where he teaches Spanish. He has translated works by authors from around the Spanish-speaking world, including David Huerta, Virgilio Piñera, Alberto Ruy Sánchez, and Belén Gopegui's  La escala de los mapas [The Scale of Maps, City Lights, 2011]. Schafer is a founding member of the Boston Area Literary Translators Group. He lives in Roxbury, Massachusetts.

Summary

This is the story of Olga, a retired mathematician, and Mateo, a college student passionate about robotics, and their plot to influence Google.
"This book has excited me more than any that I have read this year."—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

"This is a beautifully written, endlessly provocative meditation on humanity's relationship to technology, monopoly, memory and fate."— Dave Eggers, author of The Circle and The Every
After a chance encounter at the public library, two new friends begin to meet up regularly. Together they decide to submit an application for Google sponsorship to an elite technology-training program. Hoping to stand out, they frame their submission as a direct appeal to the "conscience" of the seemingly all-powerful corporation.
Olga, a retired entrepreneur, and Mateo, a college student, find unexpected connection and solace in their conversations. Ideas and arguments open into personal stories as they debate the possibility of free will, the existence of merit, and the role of artificial intelligence. They ask the most basic and important of questions: What does it mean to be human in a reality shaped by data and surveillance? Is there still space for empathy and care? What could we be, what could we build, if we used our resources in different ways?

Foreword

*Co-op available*Galleys available
*National print campaign: Will pursue reviews in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, San Francisco Chronicle, Elle Magazine, Jacobin, Guernica, and elsewhere. Focus on literary, literature in translation, and women's media.
*Pursuing excerpts in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, n + 1 and elsewhere.
*Online/social media campaign: Outreach to Words Without Borders, The Rumpus, Oprah Daily, NPR.com, as well as promotion on City Lights's social media accounts: * Instagram (50K followers ), Facebook (58K followers) and Twitter (136K followers)
*Tour info: Will pursue virtual events with bookstores with interest in literature in translation, with translator and author joining us.
*Bookseller/Library promotions: We’re pursuing nominations for IndieNext and we are open to other bookseller and library promotions that are appropriate for the book.
Endorsements – pursuing: William Gibson, Kelly Link, Charlie Jane Anders, Tim Maughan, Lauren Oyler, Anna Weiner, Dave Eggers, Ian McEwen, Sarah Pinsker, Rana el Kaliouby, Nick Bostrum, Andrew Ng, Fei-Fei Li, Andrej Karpathy, Robert Sapolsky, Jaron Lanier, Trevor Paglen, Ellen Ullman

Product details

• Authors: Belen Gopegui, Belén Gopegui, Beln Gopegui
• Assisted by: Mark Schafer (Translation)
• Publisher: City Light Books
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 21.03.2023, delayed
• EAN: 9780872868939
• ISBN: 978-0-87286-893-9
• No. of pages: 188
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; FICTION / Literary, Technothriller, FICTION / Thrillers / Technological, Fiction: general & literary, FICTION / World Literature / Spain / General