Calvin Kasulke’s Several People Are Typing is the latest selection for the Good Morning America book club.
Kasulke’s novel, his first, follows an employee at a public relations firm in New York whose consciousness becomes trapped in his company’s Slack channel. A critic for Kirkus called the novel “a compulsively readable satire of modern corporate culture.”
Readers unfamiliar with Slack and its enigmatically named “knock brush” notification sound don’t have to worry, Kasulke told GMA.
“Even though the book is written entirely in Slack chats, you don’t need to ever have used Slack or to even really know what Slack is to read this book,” he said. “If you’ve ever sent a text message or DM or been in a group chat, you’re totally gonna get this.”
In an interview with NPR, Kasulke said he hadn’t predicted how much Slack would have become a part of everyday life when he started writing the book.
“I wrote it in a couple of months in early 2019,” he said. “I kept on saying…this book is going to age like yogurt. You know, I was just convinced that in a year or two… Slack was going to be…outmoded by something else. And, you know, people weren’t going to understand. And I was extremely wrong about that.”
Several People Are Talking was published today by Doubleday.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
