I can’t quite believe it, but Ensorcelled comes out in just 10 days.

For the very first time, I’m doing preorders through Eliot’s Cozy Little Internet Bookstore so you can buy a signed copy directly from me. As a result, I’ve spent the past week signing, packaging, and ferrying books over to the post office to dispatch all over the country. This physical, repetitive work has proved wonderfully meditative during the pre-launch phase that is normally flush with anxiety. It’s a powerful reminder of how magical it is that you can make something you’re proud of for people you care and bring it straight to them. My favorite moments are when I receive preorders for multiple signed copies. Like wine, books are better when shared.

“All over the country” doesn’t quite cover it: I’ve received a fair number of messages from readers who live outside the United States politely notifying me of their disappointment that there was no option for international shipping. Moved by their entreaties, I purchased one-off international shipping labels and included them in the preorder list. This happened enough that I went ahead and enabled international shipping on Eliot’s Cozy Little Internet Bookstore. It’s eye-wateringly expensive, but you can now order a signed copy from (almost) anywhere on planet Earth!

I’ll send out a final batch of signed preorders this week, so if you want one, now’s the time.

And now, a book I love that you might too:

Breakneck by Dan Wang takes you on a fascinating journey through China’s engineering state, juxtaposing it against America’s lawyerly society in an effort to reveal what each country should learn from the other. I’ve been a keen reader of Dan’s personal blog for many years and am delighted to report that this book, his first, features everything I love most about his writing: his unbounded curiosity, thoughtful analysis, compelling storytelling, self-awareness, offbeat sense of humor, and insights born of lived experience. The world needs more deep thinking of the kind Dan brings to the geopolitical relationship that will define this century.

Things worth sharing:

• At 10am pt on Saturday, October 18th, Michael Cruickshank will be hosting me for a special discussion of Ensorcelled over on Interintellect. Unlike podcast interviews, Interintellect’s virtual salons are live group video calls where everyone gets to chime in. I did one when Veil came out and it was such a fresh, intimate experience that I’m excited to do another one. We’ll go deep on the story behind Ensorcelled, creative process, writing, publishing, rewilding attention, and anything else participants want to talk about. If you have questions for me, this is the place to get them answered. Tickets are $5. Register now.

• This bar is so good I wrote it into a novel.

• William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: “The particulars of new places grabbed me and held me, the sweep of new coasts, cold, lovely, dawns. The world was incomprehensibly large, and there was still so much to see. Yes, I got sick sometimes of being an expatriate, always ignorant, on the outside of things, but I didn’t feel ready for domestic life, for seeing the same people, the same places, thinking more or less the same thoughts, each day. I liked surrendering to the onrush, the uncertainty, the serendipity of the road.”

• For me, writing often starts with a question. If it’s an interesting question with a straightforward answer, it might turn into an essay. But if it’s interesting question that’s unusually difficult to answer, it sometimes grows into a novel. In the words of Nick Harkaway, “Questions that trouble the mind are the only ones worth considering.”

• The market for AIs will operate like choosing among the crew of the Enterprise. Do you want Kirk, Spock, or Uhura? Like Inside Out, each human-facing agent will be a construct of many different AIs under the hood with nests of context-dependent prompts, code, and databases—”I contain multitudes.”

• Mohsin Hamid, Exit West: “Every time a couple moves they begin, if their attention is still drawn to one another, to see each other differently, for personalities are not a single immutable color, like white or blue, but rather illuminated screens, and the shades we reflect depend much on what is around us.”

• The best predictor that I will enjoy a new book is not the subject, genre, publisher, or reviews, but whether I have read and enjoyed the author’s previous work, even if it’s entirely unrelated.

Thanks for reading. We all find our next favorite book because someone we trust recommends it. So when you fall in love with a story, tell your friends. Culture is a collective project in which we all have a stake and a voice.

Best, Eliot

Eliot Peper is the author of Ensorcelled, Foundry, Reap3r, Veil, Breach, Borderless, Bandwidth, Neon Fever Dream, Cumulus, Exit Strategy, Power Play, and Version 1.0. He also works on special projects.

“A tightly-woven tale of espionage and self-realization. Do yourself a favor and check out Neon Fever Dream.”
-Popular Science