William Kherbek: Twenty Tales from our Technofeudal Tomorrow

Arcadia Missa, 2021, Softcover, 116 pages, 23 × 16 cm

William Kherbek’s Twenty Tales from our Technofeudal Tomorrow are of course twenty tales from our technofeudal today. From the software company to the art gallery to the prison to the nature park, here is our scary, scary world as seen through the Kherbekian filter: colors pushed to full saturation, soundtrack ramped up to eleven, video played at 1.1x speed. Luckily, the terror of true realism is laced with wild insights, and the acerbic critique is mercifully cut with Kherbek’s signature raucous hilarity.

Read this book for its political sagacity and wit, but also for its linguistic extravagance, its jubilant play on every word you thought you knew — down to the last punctuation mark. It’s the kind of funny that makes you smack yourself on the forehead. (But as always, as one character reminds, “keep one hand free for rose.”) We can only hope that some CEO does not pick this book up and take it as an instruction manual.