Information Age

This week on Tasteland, Daisy and Francis were joined by Cora Lewis, author of the forthcoming novella Information Age, out from Joyland Editions on July 15th. Keep scrolling to listen to the full episode!

Cora is a writer and reporter whose fiction has appeared in The Yale Review, Joyland Magazine, Epiphany, and elsewhere. She currently works at the Associated Press in New York, and she previously worked at BuzzFeed News.

Information Age is a fictional account of a young reporter in the late 2010s whose worldview is shaped by vignettes, retold memories (of herself and others) and overheard dialogue. She narrates in curious chains of association, as if from a lined notebook.

Information Age is the first book from Joyland Editions, a nonprofit independent press founded in 2025 and edited by (friends of Dirt) Michelle Lyn King and Madeleine Crum with a focus on novellas. There is a party at Public Records in Brooklyn to celebrate the launch of the book on July 15th.

Francis Zierer: I was looking at your previously published fiction. Information Age was used as the title for a piece in The Yale Review published in 2022, and it was really interesting because the first two lines are the same as the first two lines of the book.

Where did the title come from? And was this particular piece of fiction the moment when you were starting to form all these notes you'd been taking into this book?

Cora Lewis: This piece was picked from the slush pile by Rachel Mannheimer, who's a very talented poet and editor. I was sending out these pieces that were composed of snippets and notes that I was organizing into what would become this book. And I think I had just found that title and was so happy about it because it seemed to capture so much about what the book was, coming of age in a time of information overload. And it was maybe playful, but also capacious and a little bit understated. 

Daisy Alioto: Does Information Age count as an internet novel? There is an element in the book of thinking in fragments that the current attention economy seems to incentivize; that if your attention is constantly shifting, the thoughts that you're having are shorter and they might string together in unusual ways. But there's something about it that's also very timeless in the sense that reporters have always kept a notebook where you're taking down fragments. The way that this book is like an internet novel to me is inseparable from the way it's like a journalist's novel.

CL: I feel the same way. Renata Adler wrote Speedboat before the internet and it was the same reporter's notebook arranged according to her own associative logic. And Patricia Lockwood writes in this way and she's definitely a writer of the internet. And so the fact that there can be these connections between these two styles across time is really satisfying to me. It doesn't seem to me necessarily tied to the present in all the ways you describe, but then at the same time, it's really modern and contemporary to have these blips and these telegraphic dispatches, like tweets or Instagram posts or whatever you can scroll through really easily.

FZ: One of my favorite things that you did in this book was very short chapters. There's one chapter that is literally one sentence. And it's the only thing on the page. 

CL: Well, I'm really grateful to Maddie (Crum) and Joyland for being behind the way the book is arranged and edited. I think there was a version of the book without any chapters and without any sections and there were some where there were headings grouping what's going on under particular categories, which was definitely wrong. So I'm glad we got rid of that. I do agree that the way that chapters operate in the book is helpful in terms of creating rhythm and a cadence that you can then interrupt in a fun way. The juxtaposition between the few cases where there are longer scenes and you get to linger on a memory or something dramatic that's happening. And that put up against these very short texts or an email or a quiz. I find it really fun as a reader and writer. And I also think it mimics the experience of being on the internet or being alive right now.

DA: I think there's a certain type of person who might say, “well, I could absolutely write a book in fragments.” But there is an artistry and a craft to putting them together. One way that I've heard it described (by Laurie Stone) is like running your hand across the page and feeling where the heat is. I also think there's something very musical about it. How do you know you've reached a critical mass of inclusion and material when you're putting it together?

CL: I love thinking about the musicality of it too. I think there is something intuitive to knowing if something is harmoniously paired or if it's dissonant somehow. I do feel it in my body or my ear when I read it back to myself. I think because it took me such a long time to write, I was submitting little excerpts of it as stories for a number of years. So sometimes editors would kind of affirm for me that something had a shape or enough of a shape to constitute a story. And then there were enough stories to constitute a novella according to these two wonderful people who are publishing it.

Editing the book, we thought a lot about what a reader might want, where context or more characterization was needed. Having other smarter readers is also really helpful as part of the process.

DA: There's a real warmth to this book, and I think it's equally about how the relationships that we're in shape the way that we think. Which reminds me of the book Notes that we put out with Night Gallery earlier this year, where we solicited people's iPhone notes screenshots. There was a lot of warmth to those as well.

CL: Some of this was written in the Notes app for sure and then into Microsoft Word and then printed out onto paper. And then yes, I did rearrange them and cut them up and use index cards. I do think it's really modular and that's something that is interesting to me about the book: that a lot of these fragments could exist in different places and maybe that would change the story, but that taken together, you arrive at the same place over this period of years.

DA: To the extent that you combine experiences that are adjacent to ones that you clearly had and things from your imagination, do you feel a pressure to account for the representation of the parties? 

CL: I do think one has a duty to represent reality to the best of one's abilities and draw from life in a way that's thoughtful. I think that ties into the journalistic energy where you don't want to come to a project with a motive that's off. I was pretty young when I started writing this, so there is this way in which this book is about a completely different set of people than currently exist, myself included.

That's the paradoxical and fun part of drawing from life for me. It just seems like such a rich source of material and energy. And then moving things around also helps me feel as though I'm exerting control as an author over what the story is and how it's operating. 🔹

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