Come Join Our Disease
By: Sam Byers
3.04
Format: 368 pages, ebook
Sam Byers's mastery of tone and attentiveness to every psychological shift confirms him as one of t…
Want to Read"For Zelma it was less about expression and more about reply. She couldn't tune out the exhortations but neither could she allow them simply to pass through her unchecked and uninterrogated. She had to respond and yet the responses that were expected of her work proscribed. It wasn't enough, she often said, to discuss these things online. To do so, she felt, was to accept the space she had been allotted. She wanted argument and debate to unfold in the same location it was initiated. When an advert invaded her mental and visual space, she invaded its physical and aesthetic space right back. In our rush to the web, she said, we had ceded ground in the physical world. As a result, ever more overt expressions went unnoticed and unchallenged. What once would have found itself defaced was now, instead, photographed and shared online for critique. But its form, its face, remained unaltered, untarnished, clean. (p.128)"-Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease
"I understood, too, what was upsetting my supposed benefactors. This wasn't about my work or my Instagram feed, or whatever uncomfortable email or phone call. Ryan and Seth had received this morning from whichever of their corporate partners was currently on edge. This was about the extent to which I would seem to be playing my role. Just as I had come to understand that in the world of Pict it wasn't enough simply to go to work and go home - that there was, in addition, and expectation of some deeper, human contribution - so too, in the context of this programme, this opportunity, it would never be enough simply to point to the material gains I had made. They needed me to be not only successful, but happy, evolved, gratefully aglow. It was my job to make them feel good about themselves and to help them package up that satisfaction for the consumption of others. In my mind, I saw their vision: me, on a podium or stage, perhaps giving a TED talk, gushing about the life in the change in my life they'd occasioned. (p.165)"-Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease
"But what aren't you doing already? What more can you possibly do?’ ‘I guess he means the team stuff’, I said. ‘The bonding. The camaraderie I've never really been –‘. ‘Don't start judging yourself’, she said sharply. ‘Don't start seeing yourself in the light of those kinds of standards.’ ‘No, but it's true. There's always been the part of work I've struggled with, the unquestioning side. The feeling of joining in. I've always tried to do it at this kind of remove. Maybe what he's saying is –‘ ‘Of course you've done it at a remove. How else are you supposed to do it and still be you?’ ‘But maybe those days are gone’, I said. ‘Maybe I have to accept that. Maybe there just won't be those kind of jobs anymore - the ones where you can roll out of bed and staggering without speaking to anyone and keep your head down and just do it, you know? maybe this is what work is, now’ […] ‘Definitely. Simple tasks can be automated. They've already almost got the machine learning to do what you do. It's about what else a human can bring to the table, which is, literally, their humanity.’ It was possible, I realised, to imagine. A semi-global future in which the bulk of paid human employment would revolve not around hard skills, but around the messy, blurry business of interpersonal success. A new divide would open up, between the well liked, The easy to get along with, and the awkward, The rude, the unfriendly. I pictured the encampment on which I had lived, filled not as it was then, with migrants, unfortunates, hard drinkers, the out of luck. But instead, the abrasive, the poorly adjusted, the excessively reserved and painfully shy. (p.136-7)"-Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease
If you liked the literary fiction plot in Come Join Our Disease by Sam Byers , here is a list of 11 books like this:
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Swimming Homeis a subversive page-turner, a merciless gaze at the insidious harm that depression ca… read more
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2. Perfume & Pain
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"I sit down wanting to write the great lesbian love story, but wacko bitches just keep coming out."-Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain
3. Out There
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4. Saha
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"to be loved, was just to be watched"-Dizz Tate, Brutes
"We feel chased. It doesn't matter if it's only by our own shadows."-Dizz Tate, Brutes
"and now I think that to humiliate a woman is the only way some men know how to love one."-Dizz Tate, Brutes
"To be loved was just to be watched, or in my case, to imagine you are loved is to imagine you are watched all the time."-Dizz Tate, Brutes
6. Milk Teeth
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From the author of the award-winning Saltwater comes a beautifully told love story set across Engla… read more
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It’s New Year’s Eve, the holiday of forced gaiety, mandatory fun, and paper hats. While dining out … read more
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8. Termush
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Introduced by Jeff VanderMeer, welcome to a luxury hotel at the end of the world in this post-apoca… read more
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"An inspired lie could be preferred to a malignant truth."-Sven Holm, Termush
"I must ask myself whether I am not colouring what I see with my own views."-Sven Holm, Termush
"- I do have some faith in democracy, but I don't think that this vote can be regarded as a matter of course as democratic. The voters knew too little about the alternatives. - They are always Ill-inf…"-Sven Holm, Termush
9. Lioness
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3.43
Format: 352 pages, Hardcover
You know how we say we devoured a story, and also that we were consumed by it? Eating and being eat… read more
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3.71
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From Claire C. Holland, a timely collection of poetry that follows the final girl of slasher cinema… read more
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"Her faced, bathed in blood. Her smile, crazed. The sounds she makes as she escapes. There is nothing else in this world like realizing you're going to live and not being sure you can."-Claire C. Holland, I Am Not Your Final Girl
11. The New Me
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3.31
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A biting satire of the false promise of reinvention, by a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honor… read more
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12. Everything You Ever Wanted
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13. Tell Me an Ending
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3.64
Format: 448 pages, Hardcover
What if you didn't have to live with your worst memories? Across the world, thousands of people … read more
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"Where does the human regret live? Police stations, hospitals. Courtrooms. Hotel bedrooms- bedrooms in general. They should advertise on pillowcases."-Jo Harkin, Tell Me an Ending
14. Fragile Animals
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3.61
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When an ex-catholic woman develops a sexual relationship with a vampire, she is forced to confront … read more
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15. Nothing to See
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It’s 1994. Peggy and Greta are learning how to live sober. They go to meetings and they ring their … read more
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16. Trinity, Trinity, Trinity
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17. You Have to Make Your Own Fun Around Here
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3.50
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'This atmospheric debut looks like a rural Irish coming-of-age novel, but it’s cleverer, darker, mo… read more
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18. Correctional
By: N.J. Crosskey
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ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022, METRO, EVENING STANDARD, REFINERY29, COSMOPOLITAN'Tenants should be … read more
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21. Come Join Our Disease
By: Sam Byers
3.04
Format: 368 pages, ebook
Sam Byers's mastery of tone and attentiveness to every psychological shift confirms him as one of t… read more
Want to ReadSimilar categories in Sam Byers's Come Join Our Disease book and Sam Byers's Come Join Our Disease
- literary fiction
- psychology
- mental health
- dystopia
- fiction
- contemporary
- horror
- audiobook
"For Zelma it was less about expression and more about reply. She couldn't tune out the exhortations but neither could she allow them simply to pass through her unchecked and uninterrogated. She had t…"-Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease
"I understood, too, what was upsetting my supposed benefactors. This wasn't about my work or my Instagram feed, or whatever uncomfortable email or phone call. Ryan and Seth had received this morning f…"-Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease
"But what aren't you doing already? What more can you possibly do?’ ‘I guess he means the team stuff’, I said. ‘The bonding. The camaraderie I've never really been –‘. ‘Don't start judging yourself’, …"-Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease
