With a New Introduction by Jaron LanierA Salon Best Book of the YearIn 1997, the computer was still a relatively new tool---a sleek and unforgiving machine that was beyond the grasp of most users. With intimate and unflinching detail, software engineer Ellen Ullman examines the strange ecstasy of being at the forefront of the predominantly male technological revolution, and the difficulty of translating the inherent messiness of human life into artful and efficient c...

Dopo un dottorato in materie umanistiche, e con un passato da attivista politica alle spalle, Ellen Ullman si ritrova nella mitica Silicon Valley quasi per caso: all'inizio degli anni Ottanta un periodo di crisi del sistema accademico statunitense la spinge a cercare un lavoro temporaneo dove è più facile trovarlo, e cioè in quel settore tecnologico che, nella California del Nord, sta facendo da incunabolo alla rivoluzione digitale. Programmatrice della primissima ora, doppiamente outsider...

Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents, Ellen Ullman's cult classic memoir of the world of computers in the 1980s and early 1990s, is an insight of a world we rarely see up close. "Astonishing... impossible to put down"San Francisco Chronicle "We see the seduction at the heart of programming: embedded in the hijinks and hieroglyphics are the esoteric mysteries of the human mind" — Wired Close to the Machine has become a cult classic: Ellen Ullman's humane, insightful, and b...

The never-more-necessary return of one of our most vital and eloquent voices on technology and culture, the author of the seminal Close to the MachineThe last twenty years have brought us the rise of the internet, the development of artificial intelligence, the ubiquity of once unimaginably powerful computers, and the thorough transformation of our economy and society. Through it all, Ellen Ullman lived and worked inside that rising culture of technology, a...

With a New Introduction by Mary GaitskillA PEN/Hemingway Award FinalistA New York Times Book Review Notable BookEllen Ullman is a "rarity, a computer programmer with a poet's feeling for language" (Laura Miller, Salon). The Bug breaks new ground in literary fiction, offering us a deep look into the internal lives of people in the technical world. Set in a start-up company in 1984, this highly acclaimed first novel explores what happens when a...

A New York Times Notable Book of 2012 From the acclaimed American novelist and memoirist Ellen Ullman, By Blood is a gothic noir novel that explores questions about fate, identity and genetics in the guise of a gripping psychological thriller. A professor is on leave from his post a leave that may have been forced upon him. He may or may not be of sound mind. To steady himself, he rents an office in San Francisco. It is 1974, a time when free love and psychedelic ecstasy have given way to ...

This program is read by the author.The never-more-necessary return of one of our most vital and eloquent voices on technology and culture, the author of the seminal Close to the MachineThe last twenty years have brought us the rise of the internet, the development of artificial intelligence, the ubiquity of once unimaginably powerful computers, and the thorough transformation of our economy and society. Through it all, Ellen Ullman lived and worked...

An award-winning writer returns with a major, absorbing, atmospheric novel that takes on the most dramatic and profoundly personal subject matter.San Francisco in the 1970s. Free love has given way to radical feminism, psychedelic ecstasy to hard-edged gloom. The Zodiac Killer stalks the streets. A disgraced professor takes an office in a downtown tower to plot his return. But the walls are thin and he’s distracted by voices from next door—his neighbor is a psychologist, and one of...

In this audiobook, Mack Sanderson and Emily Schwing reveal the stories behind the computer coding that touches all aspects of life—for better or worseFew of us give much thought to computer code or how it comes to be. The very word "code" makes it sound immutable or even inevitable. "You Are Not Expected to Understand This" demonstrates that, far from being preordained, computer code is the result of very human decisions, ones we all live with when we use s...

Leading technologists, historians, and journalists reveal the stories behind the computer coding that touches all aspects of life—for better or worseFew of us give much thought to computer code or how it comes to be. The very word “code” makes it sound immutable or even inevitable. “You Are Not Expected to Understand This” demonstrates that, far from being preordained, computer code is the result of very human decisions, ones we all live with when we use s...

A disgraced professor becomes obsessed after eavesdropping on a therapy session in this "irresistible Hitchcockian page-turner" ( Publishers Weekly).A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice"A literary inquiry into identity and legacy, a gripping mystery—remarkable." — Los Angeles Times"A rich, taut, psychologically nuanced novel. . . . A first-rate literary thriller of compelli...

The debut novel by the acclaimed American novelist and former computer programmer Ellen Ullman, The Bug is both a novel of ideas and a suspense story. 'Thrilling and intellectually fearless . . . If more contemporary novels delivered news this relevant and wise they'd have to stop declaring the death of the novel' — The New York Times In one of the computer-dictated pauses that now constantly intrude on our lives, Roberta Walton starts to think back twenty years, to her first job in comput...