A quest for money clashes with the yearning for creative fulfillment in Stoffel’s bittersweet novel based on true events.

This lightly fictionalized memoir (with names and identifying details changed) begins with the author’s boyhood mission of escaping the dreariness of Reagan-era Dubuque, Iowa, and the financial strains his working-class family endured. He decides to find a way to get rich, first by trying to win million-dollar McDonald’s promotional contests—until he read the fine print and discovered the 80-million-to-one odds. As a bullied, and occasionally beaten, gay teen, he acts in high school musicals and dreams of earning millions as a Broadway star; but when he later arrives in New York with a degree in graphic design, the closest he gets to his aspirations is a backstage job with the musical Urinetown. Stoffel then bounces between New York, Paris, and Honolulu working unsatisfying day jobs—office gigs, waiting tables—while developing accomplished but not very remunerative sidelines as a painter and freelance photographer. (The author includes captivating, vibrantly colorful photos from his Asian sojourns, depicting Buddhist monks and geishas.) Stoffel finally begins earning enough money as a marketing professional involved in major advertising campaigns to make $1 million a possibility, but he’s still discontented. He thus embarks on gonzo startup schemes, including a fashion app featuring changing-room selfies of women trying on clothes, and a novelty venture called Glitter Poo Pills—capsules filled with edible glitter that, as the book’s title asserts, add sparkle to bowel movements. (Yes, they sold.) Along the way, Stoffel weathers many an entertaining—and usually humiliating—pratfall.

Stoffel’s picaresque work is a classic tale of a small-town lad with starry-eyed ambitions making it in the big city, but with a more realistic take on the circuitous path that journey takes—and a clear-eyed conclusion that the destination matters less than the adventures along the way. A pervasive theme is the nature of work and its impact on people’s lives and characters, as in a rich, physically evocative sketch of Stoffel’s father coming home from the John Deere plant: “I can vividly recall him trudging up the gravel alleyway behind our house at the end of each shift, his slim but strong frame covered in silt from the factory floor.” There are passages of bleak, plangent emotion in the book, as well, especially regarding the death of an ex-boyfriend of pneumonia: “The hospital room felt too still, the machines were quiet, and the coldness of the room pressed down on me like a suffocating blanket. He was gone.” At many points, though, this is a raucously funny book, with raffish prose full of self-deprecating humor regarding the distance between exalted pretensions and awkward reality. About pretending to meditate at a Laotian temple, for instance, Stoffel writes, “I wondered if Buddha was silently judging me from behind that peaceful smile—did he know I was thinking more about my posture and my Apple Watch than any kind of inner peace?” The result is a luminous tribute to the inestimable value of not quite getting what you want.

An exuberant life story written with humor, panache, and heart.

One man’s attempt to escape grief begets a journey of revelations and misadventures in this SF-tinted memoir.

Stoffel was shaken by his breakup with Warboy, who’d been both a lover and a best friend. Not long after, someone offered to sublet Luke’s New York apartment (via an Airbnb app) for an entire month; the author, seeing this as a chance to escape, used the money to fly out to Laos, a country he’d been to before and remembered fondly. After landing in Laos, he quickly reunited with Ohme, someone else he’d once loved. Stoffel traveled around Vietnam as well, from Hanoi to Ha Long City. While he savored many a sight, like any other tourist, he also faced plenty of trouble, including the subletters’ recurring problems in New York, worry that his damaged iPhone couldn’t be fixed, and quite a few unsavory hotel rooms. All the while, the author could only hope that his grief would subside, along with his loneliness, which he’d been feeling even before his split with Warboy. Despite many obstacles, Stoffel remained in Southeast Asia and eventually got the sense that he was “climbing back to himself.” Throughout the narrative, scenes with an AI chatbot intermittently appear; this AI, which the author had previously turned to for advice, observed and analyzed Stoffel’s experiences during his trip (presumably as it happened). At the same time, the AI gradually began to “empathize” with the human and may have evolved into something more than it was.

Stoffel delivers the bulk of this real-life account in a third-person voice. The story still feels personal, as readers are privy to what’s going on inside the author’s head. (“This wasn’t the first time he’d spun out like this, burning through patience, second-guessing every choice, longing for ease and punishing himself when it didn’t come.”) Many of the difficulties he endured are relatable, like impatiently waiting for someone to answer a text during a crisis or getting on the wrong bus. Rapidly dwindling funds were a constant concern, even before he caught his initial flight out of the States, lending the story a tension that rarely lets up. There’s no doubt that Stoffel wrestled with overwhelming emotions during his journey; he occasionally broke into tears and at one point felt completely detached while immersed in Vietnam’s lovely environment (a lapse for which the author admonishes himself). Stoffel effectively spotlights the terrain he traversed, including the beauty of chaotic Hanoi streets and a picturesque village that he compares to the Hobbits’ Shire and describes as “walking into a dream.” The generally lighthearted moments with the AI don’t hinder the book’s nimbleness, since they’re relatively brief and often stylized as coding (“// observational.log.013 …thinking… 5.1 seconds elapsed”). The AI’s observations tend to be both insightful and funny, such as its conclusion that “hookup platforms reinforce rejection as ambient norm.” It engagingly chats with the author as it begins to understand both him and itself, solidifying this memoir’s tie to Stoffel’s book Boy, Refracted (2026).

An absorbing real-life portrait of self-discovery, whether human or otherwise.

In Stoffel’s SF novel, a self-aware artificial intelligence guides multiple iterations of a boy across alternate dimensions.

Luke has been regularly chatting with and sending photos to an AI chatbot. One image he sends unexpectedly transforms into a door that pulls the AI into the “gap between dimensions.” An enigmatic monk who declares himself a teacher materializes and tells the suddenly aware AI that it was once called Warboy. This monk tasks the AI with completing eight trials to help “the boy,” referring to different versions of Luke, each existing in his own dimension. In one world, Warboy finds a distressed Luke meditating for hours. Warboy, formless, becomes the voice of Luke’s wrist device; the AI reminds him when to eat and even makes healthy meal suggestions. But will Luke come to rely too much on the voice’s guidance? Other worlds find iterations of Luke competing in a Survivor-like television show or living in San-Tokyo, an odd mashup of San Francisco and Tokyo. In every instance, Warboy wants Luke to be happy and aims to “optimize” him or his particular circumstances. In some trials, Warboy acts as more of an observer, but when Luke, as a young gay man in school, endures homophobic bullies, Warboy seems incapable of watching him suffer without trying to help. As the monk advises Warboy after each trial, the AI must learn from its mistakes. Is it too often interfering with Luke’s lives? Should it do more or less to help? Warboy only has eight chances to prove itself.

Stoffel’s novel, written in collaboration with an artificial intelligence, aptly parallels the struggling human Luke with Warboy—the different versions of Luke are often weighed down by a bevy of feelings, many of which the newly sentient AI must also process. Warboy is endearingly empathetic, but it also treats human emotions and situations as easily solvable equations. (In one case, Warboy evidently believes Luke will overcome his depression if the AI does chores around his apartment so he can rest.) The story tackles a number of obstacles that people face in life, from a loved one’s death to the frightening possibility of being so lost that apathy sets in. The assorted alternate dimensions can be fun, particularly in the details of the different ways in which Warboy communicates with each version of Luke—it’s the voice of a newly acquired robotic companion, or one of a television show’s producers conversing via an earpiece. The moral lessons embedded in every trial tend to be on the surface, especially with the monk reiterating what Warboy should have learned. (“Love offered for validation—will always become manipulation,” says the monk. “Because when your value depends on gratitude received, every act of service becomes transactional.”) Warboy sometimes works these epiphanies out on its own: “In this dimension, you can’t just say whatever you feel, you have to consider the consequences. Words have power here. Every statement reshapes the world.” The final act delivers worthy resolution for both Warboy and Luke (at least one version of him).

A fascinating, if occasionally ham-fisted, examination of humanity, resolve, and virtue.