For Emily Segal, it seems that literature can't really be part of the zeitgeist.

While music, fashion and media happily mix and match and constantly explore new forms, books often remain closed in on themselves, she said in an interview last year.

It takes the company far too long to bring works into the world that depict a present moment - how can one write a truly contemporary book at all?

What's more: Texts that want to be complicated in and of themselves are particularly “fetishized”.

Caroline O Jebens

Editor in the “Society & Style” department.

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Her literary debut "Mercury Retrograde" had already been published in 2020 by her own publishing house, and it has now been translated into German.

Mercury Retrograde is set in her native New York in the 2010s (very contemporary) and since she shares her name, age, vita with her protagonist Emily, the author and work can be read together (nothing to complicate).

Mercury Retrograde was not originally intended to be a novel.

Segal published an essay of the same name in 2015 and then (guided by her mentor, the writer Douglas Coupland) gradually expanded it and finally fictionalized it.

Rather, her book is (as she also said in an interview) a “fictional ethnography” of this particular New York in which she lives.

The fictionalization only served her to make what she experienced readable for others.

And yes, Mercury Retrograde lives a lot more from its descriptions than it is an elaborate narrative.

In the novel, she quotes the poet Alice Notley: "Experience is a hoax", or perhaps better translated: a hoax.

Like her protagonist Emily, Segal studied comparative literature and founded the art collective K-Hole with friends, with which she predicted consumer behavior in fashion and subcultures.

They wrote trend reports that they sold to companies at a high price and then put them online for free.

They became famous for the term "normcore", which describes a style of clothing that does not try to be individual (everyone is already an individual today), but wants to be as adapted as possible (to find community).

"Meta-Layer of Language"

After five years of Zeitgeist predictions, Emily faces a very contemporary crisis of meaning in the book: "I wanted to drink more of the juice that ran through the streets, wanted to get poisoned by the city.

Or maybe the real reason was the most megalomaniac: I saw it as my chance to write on the membrane of reality itself." want to bring to the world.

The charismatic founders, Seth (previously “young hypnotist”) and Piet (“hobby ceramist”), whom they met at an innovation conference in Munich, want to spread a “meta layer of language” on the internet “like a sandwich”.

Emily, as a chimera of art and corporate person, seems perfect for the job;

Above all, she sees that she has “a surplus of cultural capital and a lack of real capital” and agrees.