Four Stories About the Human Face by Ryan Napier

Description

A man in search of a rare pink dolphin, a social media assistant for a pasta sauce company, a newlywed couple on their honeymoon, and too-proud parents of a new baby all have one thing in common: social media and modern technology have them questioning their reality. Ryan Napier makes us consider the repercussions and anxieties that result from a world that revolves around image.

Early Praise for Four Stories About the Human Face

“Ryan Napier’s sharp, inventive, and refreshingly suspenseful stories confront head-on our deep and disturbing ambivalence about the effects of technology– specifically that phone in your pocket – on the way we live now. By taking us to places both imagined and all too real, Four Stories About the Human Face made me question how much the constant (re-)construction of our identities changes the nature of experience itself.”
—CHRISTOPHER CASTELLANI, author of All This Talk of Love

“Like the work of Ben Lerner and Sheila Heti, Ryan Napier’s stunning Four Stories About the Human Face presents the world we know, but refracted through a lens so original and so perceptive everything is made new. Here is a complex, hilarious, moving debut that wears its intelligence with the artful lightness of a master.”
—MARK POWELL, author of Small Treasons

Ryan Napier

Ryan Napier holds degrees from Stetson University and Yale Divinity School, and is a PhD candidate in English at Tufts University. His stories have appeared in Entropy, Noble / Gas Qtrly, Queen Mob’s Tea House, minor literature[s], and others. He lives in Massachusetts.