Joe Fassler is a writer and editor based in Denver, Colorado. He is an MFA graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his fiction has appeared in
The Boston Review and
Electric Literature. In 2013, Fassler started
The Atlantic’s “By Heart” series, in which he interviewed authors—including Stephen King, Elizabeth Gilbert, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, Carmen Maria Machado, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and more—about the literature that shaped their lives and work. That led to editing
Light the Dark, a book-length collection that included favorites from “By Heart” alongside new contributions. Fassler’s nonfiction has appeared in
The New York Times,
Bloomberg Businessweek,
The Guardian,
Longreads, and
The Best American Food Writing. Fassler currently teaches writing at Vermont’s Sterling College.
The Sky Was Ours is his first novel.
At Electric Lit Fassler tagged seven "warped versions of reality [in which] tech is expanding the scope of what’s possible, at a cost." One title on the list:
The Candy House by Jennifer Egan
In some ways, the invention at the heart of Egan’s novel isn’t so different from today’s internet: it’s a portal that lets billions of 
strangers connect. But our texts and posts and reels seem pretty crude compared to what’s possible with the Mandala Consciousness Cube, which lets you crawl fully inside another person’s skull. With the help of a few electrodes, people can upload their memories into a vast repository, where they can be viscerally experienced by anyone with a cube. (The device, as it works, becomes “warm as a freshly laid egg.”) It’s an unnerving portrait of the way technology hacks individual agency, coercing us into adoption no matter how much we might want to resist. And as the cube collapses distance between people, resulting in new connections that can be redemptive or uncomfortably close, Egan seems to wonder: Do we really need Silicon Valley to understand each other better? Don’t we already have fiction?
Read about
the other entries on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
Heidi Reimer is a novelist and writing coach. Her debut novel, The Mother Act, is now out from Penguin Random House. Her writing interrogates the lives of women, usually those bent on breaking free of what they’re given to create what they yearn for. Her front row seat to The Mother Act’s theatrical world began two decades ago when she met and married an actor, and her immersion in motherhood began when she adopted a toddler and discovered she was pregnant on the same day.
only contact is the letters she sends, always knowing what they’re up to, frequently judging their life choices. She’s proud of Prieto’s success as a congressman representing their Latinx Brooklyn neighborhood but disapproves of Olga’s work as the go-to wedding planner of the one percent, work Olga comes to realize she embraced in rebellion to the very values that led Blanca to leave. What different choices might she have made, Olga wonders, had her mother deemed her worthy of time and affection? Blanca is an unfulfilled longing, existing to Olga as “a floating entity,” her only location “inside the many envelopes that arrived from destinations unknown”—until the day she resurfaces in the flesh, asking for help.
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