Contemporary Authors

• Lost in Arcadia 47North (Seattle, WA), 2017

• Lost in Arcadia: A Novel - 2017 47North, https://smile.amazon.com/Lost-Arcadia-Novel-Sean-Gandert/dp/1477848533/ref=sr_1_1_twi_pap_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1517179340&sr=8-1&keywords=Gandert%2C+Sean

• Sean Gandert - https://www.seangandert.com/about/

  SEAN GANDERT

  Sean Gandert was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He received his undergraduate degree from Yale University and an MFA in creative writing from Bennington College. A freelance writer and college English instructor, Sean’s reviews and interviews have appeared in Paste magazine and other publications. An avid gamer, Sean currently resides in Florida with his partner and their three cats.

  – Photo by Miguel Gandert

Lost in Arcadia
Publishers Weekly.
264.19 (May 8, 2017): p41+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Lost in Arcadia
Sean Gandert. 47North, $14.95 trade paper (499p) ISBN 978-1-4778-4853-1
This insightful study of a world in flux, framed by a dystopian future America and a disintegrating family, is disturbingly timely. It's 2037, five years since Juan Diego Reyes, the creator of the online realm Arcadia, left his wife, Autumn, and three children for good, devoting himself fully to his work. Autumn is finally filing divorce papers, but to her surprise, Juan Diego asks to sign in person. He's interested in her work at the publishing company Glosster, with plans to exploit it for Arcadia's use, but to what end? Their story is filled out with portraits of people in their orbit: Gideon, who created (at the request of a former fringe Baptist preacher turned isolationist president) the ad-subsidized Great Wall of Freedom on the U.S.-Mexico border, takes solace in interactions with the anonymous nightXangel, while he maintains virtual reality rap megastar Gravedigger from his home. High school graduation is only a few weeks away for Devon, who uses Arcadia as an escape and is terrified of the "dark unknown" of adulthood. Holly, an artist, seeks deeper meaning in her art and the world around her. Debut author Gandert has quite a lot to say about human frailty and obsession, rampant consumerism, and, most importantly, interpersonal connection. Agent: Josh Getzler, HSG. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
1 of 2 1/28/18, 4:40 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
"Lost in Arcadia." Publishers Weekly, 8 May 2017, p. 41+. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491949082/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=ebf45522. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491949082
2 of 2 1/28/18, 4:40 PM

McArdle, Megan M.
Source:
Library Journal. 7/1/2017, Vol. 143 Issue 12, p60-60. 1/5p.
Book Review
Subject Terms:
*OPERATING systems (Computers)
*SCIENCE fiction
*FICTION
Reviews & Products:
LOST in Arcadia (Book)
NAICS/Industry Codes:
511210 Software Publishers
511211 Software publishers (except video game publishers)
GANDERT, Sean
215
0363-0277
Accession Number:
123953376
Database:
Academic Search Premier
Gandert, Sean. Lost in Arcadia. 47North: Amazon. Jul. 2017. 412p. ISBN 9781477848531. pap. $14.95. SF
DEBUT In 2037, the world has adopted a new online obsession: Arcadia—an operating system, game platform, and social media engine all in one. The invention of game designer Juan Diego Reyes, Arcadia made his family wealthy, but one day, Juan Diego mysteriously disappeared. Left behind are his wife, Autumn, who does her best to hold the family together, oldest son Gideon, who becomes a marketing genius, making the world believe in fantasy, and middle child Holly, who works halfheartedly as an artist. The youngest, Devon, spends all his time on Arcadia, until real life intrudes in an all too serious way. While this is not the first novel to consider how life online can rob people of true intimacy, the characters are well drawn in this debut. Especially affecting is the downward spiral of Gideon, who almost completely retreats from the world, becoming obsessed with a woman he watches undress online for money. VERDICT For those who enjoy sf one step into the future.

• Every Free Chance Books
  http://everyfreechance.com/2017/12/dnf-lost-in-arcadia-by-sean-gandert.html
  Word count: 435

  DNF: Lost in Arcadia by Sean Gandert
  December 11, 2017 By TheEveryFreeChanceReader 6 Comments

  Lost in ArcadiaLost in Arcadia
  written by Sean Gandert
  published by 47North, 2017

  find it here: (affiliate links) Barnes & Noble, Amazon, iBooks, Book Depository, Goodreads

  Where I stopped reading: I only made it ~20% through this book before I had to put it down and walk away.

  Why I stopped reading: This book just didn’t work. From the beginning I couldn’t tell if this was supposed to be an alternate reality, a statement about our current society, or just plain fiction. Every chapter is told from a different point of view. I usually like this type of narration; however, this book doesn’t execute it well. There are so many different characters and too many seemingly disjointed plots–it’s impossible to follow. The language is also incredibly foul. I’m not particularly opposed to cursing in books, but this book is over the top. The language doesn’t add to the story, it’s a distraction. The lack of plot, the disorganized chapters, and the foul language all add up to an unbearable read. Definitely skip this one.

  What others have rated this book: According to Goodreads, the average rating for Lost in Arcadia is 2.65 stars. It looks like a majority of readers gave this book 3 stars. Amazon’s reviews averaged 2.3 stars. There were no reviews at Barnes & Noble. Just because I didn’t finish this book doesn’t mean you won’t.

  About the book – from Goodreads: The brainchild of reclusive genius Juan Diego Reyes, Arcadia is a wickedly immersive, all-encompassing social-media platform and virtual-reality interface. Although Arcadia has made the Reyes family fabulously wealthy, it’s left them—and the rest of the country—impoverished of that rare currency: intimacy. When Juan Diego mysteriously vanishes, the consequences shatter the lives of the entire Reyes clan.

  As matriarch Autumn struggles to hold the family together, siblings Gideon, Holly, and Devon wrestle with questions of purpose and meaning—seeking self-worth in a world where everything has been cheapened. Outside the artificial safety of Arcadia, America has crumbled into an unrecognizable nation where a fundamentalist ex-preacher occupies the Oval Office, megacorporations blithely exploit their full citizenship, and a twenty-foot-high Great Wall of Freedom plastered with lucrative advertising bestrides the US-Mexican border.

  In a polarized society now cripplingly hooked on manufactured highs, the Reyes family must overcome the seduction of simulation to find the kind of authentic human connection that offers salvation for all.

• Albuquerque Journal
  https://www.abqjournal.com/1036793/virtual.html
  Word count: 553

  Virtual unreality
  By David Steinberg / For The Journal
  Sunday, July 23rd, 2017 at 12:02am
  ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — There’s a lot going on in Sean Gandert’s newly published futuristic novel, “Lost in Arcadia.”

  Sean Gandert discusses and signs “Lost in Arcadia, A Novel” at 3 p.m. Sunday, July 23 at Bookworks, 4022 Rio Grande NW. (SOURCE: Miguel Gandert)

  Society suffers an addiction to a social media platform and a virtual reality interface. The platform and the interface carry the name of Arcadia.

  The book also paints a picture of a dystopian America in the year 2037.

  A fundamentalist ex-preacher named Haight is in the White House, and society is falling apart. Millions of people are giving up the warmth of human relations for the coldness of technology.

  Arcadia is the creation of a genius, Juan Diego Reyes, an Albuquerque resident. Reyes is so obsessed with his work that he abandoned his family five years earlier.

  His wife, Autumn, wants a divorce. She tracks him down to an office at Mesa del Sol. Autumn finds him living in a messy, smelly state of electronic equipment and dirty laundry.

  Their children – Holly, Gideon and Devon – are trying to fix their own emotional compass.

  New Mexico is a presence in the novel.

  Early in the book, Holly and a friend visit the west-central New Mexico village of Quemado and from there go to see Walter De Maria’s “The Lightning Field,” a piece of art created in 1977 made up of 400 steel poles placed in a grid.

  As Gandert says of Holly, “There was something magical about this precise configuration, and she walked through the work knowing that there were a power here, even if she didn’t understand it or know how to respond appropriately.”

  Her brother, Gideon, is trying to relearn his roles in the music business as he contemplates leaving the hustle of New York City. Their younger brother, Devon, attends Albuquerque High, but for him school is “an easy segue between (video) games.”

  Gandert, the author, is from Albuquerque and graduated from Albuquerque High in 2004. He went to Yale, where he majored in English and film studies. Gandert currently teaches English at Florida Southern College in Lakeland.

  He said his first step as writer was participating in a program in which high school students wrote articles for the Albuquerque Journal.

  Gandert, whose uncle is famous Albuquerque photographer Miguel Gandert, said Rudolfo Anaya and Jimmy Santiago Baca encouraged him to write.

  Among Gandert’s favorite authors are those who incorporate satire, namely David Foster Wallace, Franz Kafka and Gabriel García Márquez. “I use satire as a political weapon to criticize society, to exaggerate certain elements and put them in different contexts,” Gandert said.

  He’s also influenced by Albuquerque. To him, the city has seemed larger than life. “It’s not a huge city, but the things that happen in it always felt big, felt epic to me. And I felt it was the best place to put something satirical,” he said.

  Arts
  Books
  From the newspaper
  Life in NM

  Suggeste

• Literary Hub
  http://lithub.com/is-it-still-possible-to-satirize-america/
  Word count: 1394

  IS IT STILL POSSIBLE TO SATIRIZE AMERICA?
  WHEN "ABSURDIST, FUTURISTIC SATIRE" BECOMES REALITY
  July 28, 2017 By Sean Gandert

  Toward the end of 2004, I first encountered Chris Bachelder’s essay, “A Soldsier Upon a Hard Campaign: Or, The Work of Art in the Age of Passion of the Christ Jewelry.” He wrote it as a loose tie-in to his then-forthcoming novel U.S.!, a send-up of American politics structured around the cyclical resurrection and murder of the original muckraking hack-novelist Upton Sinclair. The key question at hand was: As American society is already self-satirizing, is it even possible to write good, socially conscious satire anymore?
  Back then, Bachelder was already having issues with the speed of American culture’s ridiculousness. His first novel focused on a Las Vegas event in which spectators bet on which of two super-predators would win in a fight. Not long after his book was published, the purportedly educational Discovery Channel began airing Animal Face-Off, a TV show that included exactly the type of stupid entertainment he meant to make fun of. “I found it poignant that Animal Face-Off was airing just as Bear v. Shark was sliding quietly out of print,” he wrote.
  It seemed to mean something, but I wasn’t sure what. I suppose I couldn’t figure out if the TV show made the book more or less urgent and necessary. Probably less, I decided. The lag time between absurdist, futuristic satire and American reality was something like two years in this case.
  Soon after, I returned to college to continue in my ultimately misguided goal of becoming a humor writer, a dream I’d had since I started writing comedy pieces for the local newspaper during high school. Growing up, I’d worshipped The Simpsons and idolized Conan O’Brien, who personified the smart-ass, surrealist comedy that formed my worldview. Yet I felt pulled in two directions. Although I was still spending as much time rising through the ranks of our college humor magazine and taking screenwriting courses, I was more excited by the poetry and prose required by my college’s old-fashioned and rigorous required English program. As I finished my degree, I found myself far more interested in my graduating English thesis on masks and intertextuality in Infinite Jestthan in my film thesis, a screenplay my advisor described as “either the worst good screenplay I’ve ever read, or the best bad one.” He wasn’t wrong; the comedy I’d written was missing something, as were most of the pieces we published in the magazine. My path was set—I would become, instead, a novelist.
  I didn’t start writing the book that eventually became Lost in Arcadia until 2010, two years after I graduated. I’d quit my job and figured I could finish the book’s first draft in less than a year, judging purely by how quickly I’d written screenplays and the hundreds of pieces of journalism that made up my meager income. This was, of course, an insane underestimation. An even bigger underestimation was how much revision the book would need, how many drafts I’d write before I was happy with any part of it, how many characters would completely disappear, along with scenes and ideas.
  Drawing from my humor writing background, I set out to write a satire, although of course that wasn’t the only note I wanted to hit. I believe that satire should exaggerate the world while keeping characters within it as human as possible. When people talk disparagingly of cloistered MFA fiction, they’re often speaking of books that are divorced from all concerns besides the immediate ones of their characters—the world itself is missing. I’ve always been most interested in books with the ambition to look at how important context is, and I wanted to push against what I saw around me to try and get at the heart of a world that, to my eyes, was teetering at the edge of a dangerous precipice.
  I grew up in New Mexico, and I remember hearing about the minutemen hunting down immigrants along the border not long after a pregnant girl I went to high school with was deported. My dad was a public defender, and he’d tell us the stories of other down-on-their-luck people who were arrested for simply wanting to live with and support their families. With this in mind, I decided to place at the center of my story something I would come to call “The Great Wall of Freedom”—a huge, heavily armed and guarded wall between our country and Mexico. It would symbolize not just the fear and racism plaguing large parts of America, but also our drift towards isolationism. The wall we put up between ourselves and our neighbor represented, well, the metaphorical walls we put up between ourselves and our neighbors, particularly our neighbors who aren’t white. America, as I saw it, was giving up on the rest of the world, and with this, it was giving up on any notion of responsibility or respect for anything but itself.
  This wasn’t the only idea I wanted to write about, though it was a large one. I wanted to touch on the other currents I saw emerging, from genetically enhanced crops to 3D printing to the increasing role played by video games and virtual reality in most American lives. There were other, theoretically satirical sections that I eventually dropped because, over the course of the half-decade I spent working on it, they became so commonplace as to be quaint in a novel set in the future. Novels are a slow, slow form of art, and as I neared a publishable version of the book, I entered into a strange race to finish before every single part of it became dated.
  I wasn’t the only one who recognized the encroaching reality of my originally fantastical vision of the future. In September of 2015, my agent emailed me, saying, “We have to get [the book] out while Trump is still dominating the news cycles. The comparison between him and Haight (he’s stolen the Great Wall of Freedom idea directly from you) is uncanny.” (In my novel, Haight is the ultra right wing, nakedly fascistic President of the United States whose policies shape its dystopian future.) It may be difficult to remember, but this was back when Trump was still considered a longshot, fringe candidate only popular with idiots and racists, a contingent of voters that many of us assumed was small enough to disregard. Few thought of him as a serious contender, let alone the future President. Few understood that the hate-filled nationalistic currents he embodied would form into a gale that would soon overwhelm our entire country.
  It’s now the middle of 2017. Lost in Arcadia is finished, and the wall is no longer, as Bachelder put it, “absurdist futuristic satire”; it is, instead, a part of our regular political discourse. The Muslim ban, a version of which features in my novel, has been proposed and denied repeatedly in a depressing cycle of racism and hatred, like a hydra whose heads keep reappearing as soon as they’re lopped off. I found myself rereading Bachelder’s essay and thinking about the fact that, while it took two years for reality to overtake his satire, it had, in many respects, lapped mine completely.
  I’m not alone in this. Julia Louis-Dreyfus has mentioned how Veep now seems more like a “sobering documentary” than the satire it began as, and the head writer of The Onion has spoken about his “comedic dread” at the prospect of continuing to write about the administration. But to say that satirizing Trump is impossible is akin to saying he’s already reached his limits, and I would hope that few of us would make that mistake again. The line where reality ends and satire begins has moved, for sure, but all that means is that we need to move with it. Creating and consuming satire is a way of keeping ourselves from complacency, from saying, “He can’t go any further than this,” or, in the words of Sinclair Lewis, “It can’t happen here,” because of course it can. It already has.

• Library Ladies
  https://thelibraryladies.com/tag/dystopian/
  Word count: 294

  My Notes:

  Kate here! A few years ago I was a bridesmaid in the wedding of my best friend from high school, Blake. One of Blake’s groomsmen was a guy named Sean Gandert. After a weekend of socializing and dancing together, we hit it off enough to friend one another on various social media platforms and to get into various twitter threads together (one of which about “Room 237”, the movie about various “The Shining” conspiracy theories. Oh, the jokes Sean, Blake, and I made that day!). Sean is a freelance writer who has contributed to Paste and LitHub, and now he has a book out called “Lost in Arcadia.”

  A mix of futuristic dystopia with political satire, “Lost in Arcadia” is not only a thrilling read, it also sounds like one that becomes more and more relevant with each day of this nightmare of an administration. A futuristic AI dreamscape is used to tantalize and distract the people who live in a world where a madman is president, corporations have taken over, and a giant wall is built along the border between the U.S. and Mexico. Timely indeed. And I have some good news: I want to give a copy of “Lost in Arcadia” to one of you so you too can enjoy Sean’s work!! For those interested in more information and an excerpt of this book, click HERE to see an article written by Paste Magazine. And for those who want to read some of Gandert’s other writing, THIS is a link to an article he wrote about political satire in the age of the Trump White House. Gandert is a talented writer and I am so excited to share his writing! – Kate

• http://benjamin-m-weilert.com/index.php/2017/08/10/book-lost-in-arcadia-2017/
  The BMW Creative
  Word count: 380

  Lost in Arcadia
  Year: 2017
  Author: Sean Gandert
  Length: 412 pages

  ***THIS BOOK WAS RECEIVED FROM A GOODREADS GIVEAWAY***

  When I first started reading Lost in Arcadia (the “A Novel” tag is unnecessary), I learned “Arcadia” was a computer program / operating system and expected the plot to be somewhat akin to Tron (1982), The Matrix (1999), or Ready Player One. Instead, this program barely features in the book, and the plot only briefly examines what an internet addiction can look like. Of the five-ish main characters, only three of them even interact with Arcadia, which I find hard to believe is a successful game from Electronic Arts, considering the plethora of bugs they usually have in their products.

  As a character-driven narrative, there are just too many to justify spending time with each of them. If the plot focused on the three Arcadia-linked characters, then they might have been developed and interesting. Of course, that’s if you even get that far into the book. All the characters are profane and irritating, not to mention uninteresting and practically interchangeable in the first half of the book. So often I had trouble remembering who each one of them was, what their relations were to the other characters, and why I should care. What’s worse, none of them grow, let alone change, by the end of the book, making the whole novel mostly pointless.

  Despite having a plot that started way too late and ended way too soon, I couldn’t figure out what it was trying to accomplish. If it was supposed to be satire, it wasn’t nearly funny or tongue-in-cheek enough to come across that way. If it was a scathing critique of consumerism and capitalist sensibilities, it was too heavy-handed and blunt. Seems to me, with many characters who weren’t important, and a variety of different POVs and narrative styles, that the author was merely dumping everything he wanted to say into a single book and only did a minimal amount of integration to make everything fit together.

  A book that lacked focus and was difficult to get into, I give Lost in Arcadia 2.0 stars out of 5.

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