A rip-roaring comedy about big plans and bigger egos at the world's largest tech company

Something is fishy at Anahata—Silicon Valley’s premiere tech company, and it’s not just the giant squid that serves as its mascot. An exiled prince with janitorial expertise is working as a product manager. The sales guys are battling with the engineers. The women employees are the unwitting subjects of a wild social experiment. The VPs are plotting against each other. The yoga-loving, sex-obsessed CEO is rumored to be planning a moon colony, sending his investors into a tizzy, and everyone is obsessed with Galt, their fiercest industry rival. Is it all downhill from here for the world’s largest tech company? Or is this just the beginning of a bold new phase in Anahata’s quest for global domination?

FARHAD MANJOO, THE NEW YORK TIMES

“A zany satire . her diagnosis of Silicon Valley’s cultural stagnancy is so spot on that it’s barely contestable.”

LAUREN SMILEY, THE GUARDIAN

“[Powell] wields Bonfire of the Vanities levels of absurdity and social observation to chronicle this particular northern Californian strain of masters of the universe.”

WALT MOSSBERG, FORMER WALL STREET JOURNAL COLUMNIST AND CO-FOUNDER OF RECODE

"From years of dealing with Jessica Powell during her time at Google, I knew she was witty. But I am sitting at a Starbucks laughing out loud like an idiot at her very smart new book The Big Disruption, a brilliant and funny satire of the male, engineer-driven culture of Silicon Valley where the leaders are cryptic and obtuse to reality."

TOPE FOLARIN, CAINE PRIZE WINNER AND AUTHOR, A PARTICULAR KIND OF BLACK MAN

“The best books typically prompt us to laugh or think or learn something about the world that we might not have otherwise known. You will do all these things while reading this book, and more. This is a wild, incisive, and incredibly necessary look at the way that Silicon Valley works, and a wonderfully good read as well. The Big Disruption is a book that explains and defines this moment—the kind of book many of us have been waiting for.”

KARA SWISHER, NEW YORK TIMES CONTRIBUTING OPINION WRITER AND CO-FOUNDER OF RECODE

“Jessica Powell is everything you want in a writer about power and money and lunacy in modern day Silicon Valley. She is an insider who has come outside, an insightful chronicler of the ridonkulous foibles of the digital overlords and a deft teller of tales. She was in the room and has managed to gleefully open its doors and let us see the antic circus inside. Such a view has never been more important as tech’s damage becomes more and more clear.”

Literary Paris: A Guide

For centuries Paris was the destination of writers from the provinces and from across the ocean, and the city swiftly became an integral part of the lives and work of those who went there. Literary Paris profiles thirty writers and the apartments, cafes, bistros, theaters, museums, and other places central to their daily lives and featured in their work.

Literary Paris opens with Moliere, whose farces lampooning man’s vanity and hypocrisy delighted the royal courts. In the next century, we glimpse the destitute Zola, so hungry that he ate sparrows caught on his windowsill, and the perpetually bankrupt Balzac who, hoping to evade creditors, required friends to give a secret phrase–“Apple season has arrived” or “I come with lace from Belgium”–to gain admittance into his quarters.

Among the twentieth-century writers profiled are Georges Simenon, creator of wildly popular detective novels, who in Paris began an affair with the sensational Josephine Baker; F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, instead of finding the “new rhythm” he sought, burned through his money and talent in the City of Light; as well as Henry Miller, George Orwell, James Baldwin.

Town & Country

“Much has been written about the many authors who have made the French capital their muse. A new book, Literary Paris: A Guide, by Jessica Powell offers a refreshingly concise and user-friendly look at twenty-eight writers who define the city’s belletristic tradition. Part anthology and part sight-seeing guide, it combines literary excerpts, photographs and anecdotes, ranging from Molière in the 17th century to the 1950s of James Baldwin. Each chapter profiles a different author, such as Gustave Flaubert, Oscan Wilde and Gertrude Stein, and covers the streets, gardens, monuments and bistros at which those luminaries were habitués. Readers are invited to channel Guillaume Apollinaire at the Café du Départ, pay homage to George Sand at the Musée de la Vie Romantique–and, in the process, rediscover Paris (which Victor Hugo dubbed ‘the city of cities’ in 1870) in all its erudite glory”

Satisfaction Magazine, published by The Chicago Tribune

"There are numerous guide books that include literary Paris, but this latest one is the most comprehensive and well-organized. With charming simplicity, Powell takes the reader from the 17th century to the 20th century as both a vicarious armchair read and an on-the-spot travel guide. Not one to play literary favorites, she lavishes the same attention upon remnants of Moliere’s Paris (the Comedie-Francaise, L’Auberge du Mouton-Blanc and the St. Eustache church) as she does on the less elegant hangouts of James Baldwin (such as the Hotel de Verneuil and the Hotel Bac St. Germain). Powell includes the oldest restaurant in Paris, Le Procope, in her section about Voltaire, and drops the note that Benjamin Franklin is believed to have revised the U.S. Constitution at one of its tables. Understandably, most of the book traces the adventures of great French writers but she clearly has a warm spot for Americans, too. Of course, no survey of literary Paris would be complete without the Fitzgeralds and Papa Hemingway. In
reciting the numerous bars, restaurants, bookstores, and streets that Hemingway immortalized, she repeats the wonderful, unconfirmed anecdote that when Hemingway and his irregulars arrived for the liberation of Paris near the end of WWII, he went straight to the Ritz bar with his entire company and promptly ordered seventy-three dry martinis."

Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Literary Paris: A Guide is a fascinating and inspiring new title that explores the city through the eyes of the great artists and writers who've lived there, from Albert Camus to Richard Wright."