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“Go out there” Ursula’s mysterious new boss instructs her. “Find the future. Bring it back to me.” Diet water, white contact lenses, high-heeled moccasins, tire-tread haircuts, zydeco rap, poodles with dreadlocks. These are the future. And the team of savvy trendspotters who inhabit Alex Shakar’s debut novel, The Savage Girl, mean to find it and use it to their advantage. Shakar unveils the contagious nature of a consumer landscape that seems at first entirely different and then terrifyingly similar to modern America. Both a shimmering love story and a dark reflection on the modern world, it is a novel of self-discovery and a study of self-destruction. It has been called “A crystalline satire of a preening media elite too exhausted with pillaging the minds of consumers to notice the collapsing world around them” by the Kirkus review. 

Shakar is the author of the collection of short stories City in Love,which won the National Fiction Competition and for which he received the Independent Press Editors’ “Pick of the Year” in 1996. He graduated from Yale University in 1990, was a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, and earned a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago. This fall The Savage Girl comes out in paperback and City in Love is re-released by Harper Collins.