Stay This Day and Night with Me

Description

This is the story of Olga, a retired mathematician, and Mateo, a college student passionate about robotics, and their plot to influence Google. "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?

Belen 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 Pinera, Alberto Ruy Sanchez, and Belen 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.

Praise for Stay This Day and Night With Me by Belen Gopegui and translated by Mark Schafer: "Gopegui leavens the high-mindedness with a cool sense of irony, and shines with her succinct insights on the similarities between humans and AI...Readers will be intrigued."-Publishers Weekly "Unique and fascinating, Stay This Day and Night With Me pushes beyond the political and philosophical debates of its characters to deliver a much needed dose of humanity in the face of emerging corporate, unknowable, and inhuman intelligence."-Tim Maughan, author of Infinite Detail "Two people who love robots meet in a library. A philosophical dialogue ensues. The writing is delicate, strange, and strangely riveting: Gopegui slides between registers and scales with uncommon grace. This is a book about two human beings and also what it means to be a human being in the algorithmic age. This is a book about Google, capitalism, and the ordinary unhappiness of being alive."-Ben Tarnoff, author of Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future "A thrillingly unclassifiable book of ideas about the inherent tension between being an individual while also being part of a community-and whether one's individual or communal identity is ever truly primary. Gopegui's novel is a study of empathy and human connection in a time of algorithms and tech giants, extending curiosity not only towards her very human characters, but also towards the corporate machinery that governs their lives, and the lives of her readers." -Adrienne Celt, author of End of the World House "With the Digital Age as the backdrop, Gopegui creates a novel that is as analog as they come: a conversation between two people, their philosophical debates and tender connection. As a result, she crafts a potent interrogation of the status of our modern life."-Bennard Fajardo, Politics and Prose Bookstore, Washington, D.C. Praise for The Scale of Maps by Belen Gopegui and translated by Mark Schafer: "The Scale of Mapsis a rapturous and dazzling achievement, and I, for one, am waiting impatiently for the opportunity to read more of Gopegui."-John Yargo,The Rumpus "A geographer falls irredeemably in love with a flighty mapmaker in this graceful, peculiar Spanish tale . . . beautifully composed and elegantly translated."-Publishers Weekly "Map scales are about relationships. So is The Scale of Maps, a poignant, provocative, profound and passionate book by respected Spanish writer Belen Gopegui."-The Kansas City Star "'Gopegui's first novel,;The Scale of Maps, is a story about a magic trick that Prim never quite masters, an ambitious disappearing act that ends in irredeemable failure. . . . Mark Schafer's agile translation gives Prim the fitting voice of a polished academic who has lost his bearings."-Words without Borders "It's an ambitious novel, to be sure, made beautiful by Gopegui's liquid prose, and made accessible by her ultimate refusal to answer her own questions." -Janet Potter, Bookslut "What is astonishing about this novel is the originality of its narrative strategies in harmony with the rhythm of its prose."-Carmen Martin Gaite, author of The Back Room Praise for Belen Gopegui: "Gopegui is one of our most outstanding young names [in Spanish literature]."-El Pais "Belen Gopegui makes consummate use of the novel as an instrument of political inquiry, reflection and interpellation, in the broadest sense."-Ignacio Echevarria "Belen Gopegui is my bunker."-Maria Unanue, Pikara Magazine "To break the barriers between the individual and the collective, the private and the public. That's one of the narrative projects pursued by Belen Gopegui."-Rafael Conte