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Published Feb 2021
304 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Enter the world of the Delivery Boy, who must peddle his way to 5-star customer ratings and, perhaps, freedom - in novelist and graphic designer Peter Mendelsund's The Delivery.
Countries go wrong, sometimes, and sometimes the luckier citizens of those countries have a chance to escape and seek refuge in another country―a country that might itself be in the process of going wrong.
In the bustling indifference of an unnamed city, one such citizen finds himself trapped working for a company that makes its money dispatching an army of undocumented refugees to bring the well-off men and women of this confounding metropolis their dinners. Whatever he might have been at home, this citizen is now a Delivery Boy: member of a new and invisible working class, pedaling his power-assist bike through traffic hoping for a decent tip and a five star rating.
He is decidedly a Delivery Boy; sometimes he even feels like a Delivery Baby; certainly he's not yet a Delivery Man, though he'll have to "man-up" if he wants to impress N.―the aloof dispatcher who sends him his orders and helps him with his English.
Can our hero avoid the wrath of his Supervisor, get the girl, and escape his indentured servitude? Can someone in his predicament ever get a happy ending? Who gets to decide? And who's telling this story, anyway?
Harrowing and hilarious, The Delivery is a fable for and about our times: an exploration of the ways language and commerce unites and isolates every one of us, native and immigrant both.
"[S]tunning...Mendelsund conveys the delivery boy's experiences and memories in brief crisp cuts separated by ample white space, where what's not said takes on great importance. The author's playful sense of form and command of language make for an original and provocative novel." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[B]eguiling...A timely critique of corporate vassalage in the form of an elegant, if somber, parable." - Kirkus Reviews
"Peter Mendelsund's The Delivery is not only truly original, and gorgeously written, it shines a light on a person, a population, generally invisible to all but themselves, which is among a novel's more profound purposes. It's a remarkable book." - Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours
"The infrastructure that delivers us anything we want, whenever we want it, is the work of millions of anonymous hands, millions of people―mostly unseen, mostly unthanked―who pop up and then disappear. In a quick, staccato style, Peter Mendelsund's haunting fable mirrors these movements, building and building to a startlingly full portrait a world that we too often let flash us by." - Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sontag: Her Life and Work
"An intricate fugue, a trickle that gradually builds into a torrent, Mendelsund's astonishing novel is as much a meditation on the capacities of narrative itself―its unanticipated deliverances―as a subtle reflection on the contemporary migration crisis. With its resonant tale of upheaval and adaptation, precarity and solidarity, The Delivery is a parable for our age." - Brent Hayes Edwards, author of The Practice of Diaspora
This information about The Delivery was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Peter Mendelsund is a novelist, a graphic designer, and the creative director of the Atlantic. Mendelsund is the author of several books about literature and the visual imagination: What We See When We Read, Cover, and The Look of the Book: Jackets, Covers, and Art at the Edges of Literature. His debut novel, Same Same, was published in 2019.
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