What do you think?
Rate this book
Information Age
Named a Best Book of the Year by the New Yorker, a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by The Millions, and more.
The narrator of Information Age is a journalist at an online news site reporting on technology, the economy, and politics in the late 2010s. The rate of increasingly short news cycles shapes her working life and her personal life, as she assumes the role of reporter while talking with engineers, analysts, wonks, artists, writers, musicians, friends, family, and lovers. Told in vignettes and dialogue—overheard and divulged—Information Age is spare, funny, and attentive, a playful blurring of public and private life.
CORA LEWIS is a writer and reporter whose fiction has appeared at The Yale Review, Joyland Magazine, Epiphany, and elsewhere. She currently works at the Associated Press in New York, and she previously worked at BuzzFeed News. She lives in Brooklyn near Sunset Park.
Reviews and Praise for Information Age
“Wry… Laconic… A subtle meditation on the difference between what can and cannot be communicated… suggesting that intimate moments are the most difficult to convey.” —The New Yorker
"[Lewis] brings a journalist’s sensibility to her fictional work—always observing, overhearing, curating bits of information for delivery to an audience, in order to sum up the times. Information Age tackles the problems of work, mediation, self-determination, and reproduction amid the dizzying cultural landscape" —The Los Angeles Review of Books
“Beautiful… engagingly written portrait of a young woman’s life and times.” —Kirkus
"Compulsively, delectably readable—funny, sexy, sharp, charming, sly… I gobbled it up in one sitting." —Danielle Dutton, author of Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other and co-founder of Dorothy, a publishing project
"Lewis holds up pairs of objects in a mirror, and it's our pleasure to watch as their proportions warp. A modern, delicate exercise in juxtaposition." —Lillian Fishman, author of Acts of Service
The narrator of Information Age is a journalist at an online news site reporting on technology, the economy, and politics in the late 2010s. The rate of increasingly short news cycles shapes her working life and her personal life, as she assumes the role of reporter while talking with engineers, analysts, wonks, artists, writers, musicians, friends, family, and lovers. Told in vignettes and dialogue—overheard and divulged—Information Age is spare, funny, and attentive, a playful blurring of public and private life.
CORA LEWIS is a writer and reporter whose fiction has appeared at The Yale Review, Joyland Magazine, Epiphany, and elsewhere. She currently works at the Associated Press in New York, and she previously worked at BuzzFeed News. She lives in Brooklyn near Sunset Park.
Reviews and Praise for Information Age
“Wry… Laconic… A subtle meditation on the difference between what can and cannot be communicated… suggesting that intimate moments are the most difficult to convey.” —The New Yorker
"[Lewis] brings a journalist’s sensibility to her fictional work—always observing, overhearing, curating bits of information for delivery to an audience, in order to sum up the times. Information Age tackles the problems of work, mediation, self-determination, and reproduction amid the dizzying cultural landscape" —The Los Angeles Review of Books
“Beautiful… engagingly written portrait of a young woman’s life and times.” —Kirkus
"Compulsively, delectably readable—funny, sexy, sharp, charming, sly… I gobbled it up in one sitting." —Danielle Dutton, author of Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other and co-founder of Dorothy, a publishing project
"Lewis holds up pairs of objects in a mirror, and it's our pleasure to watch as their proportions warp. A modern, delicate exercise in juxtaposition." —Lillian Fishman, author of Acts of Service
204 pages, Paperback
Published July 15, 2025
16 people are currently reading
3755 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews
July 17, 2025
This book isn’t quite like anything else I’ve read. It is pleasantly aimless in the sense that it lacks a central conflict, rather allowing tensions come and go in small doses throughout the book in much the same way that they do in everyday life. It is clever, funny, serious, and at times sexy while remaining perfectly tasteful cover to cover.
In Information Age, we are seeing the world through the narrators eyes in bits and pieces that feel carefully written to reflect the fast paced and relentlessly entertaining modern world that has been chipping away at our collective attention span. In many ways, this felt more like a commentary on life as a young adult in today’s world than a narrative piece, and I think this approach makes for an interesting read.
In Information Age, we are seeing the world through the narrators eyes in bits and pieces that feel carefully written to reflect the fast paced and relentlessly entertaining modern world that has been chipping away at our collective attention span. In many ways, this felt more like a commentary on life as a young adult in today’s world than a narrative piece, and I think this approach makes for an interesting read.
July 28, 2025
I was so absorbed by this narrator that I started to think like her. The flow of her life is simple yet so enticing. As soon as I finished the book, I wanted to read it all over again. This stayed with me from the description of living with roommates: “to one another, we’re gestures and remnants between subway rides and nights out and all our 9-to-5’s, plus overtime, always extending.”
October 9, 2025
the best book of 2025 i’ve read so far. it’s like reading the notes app of a genius. Cora Lewis is so gifted and awesome. mark my words she’s one to watch!!
August 4, 2025
“It sounds like you’re experiencing a profound alienation from the production and dissemination of information”
This was so good and had so many good quotes. Informative and tender.
This was so good and had so many good quotes. Informative and tender.
September 21, 2025
I'm a real sucker for books written in the present tense, and this is no exception. This book clips along, at times like little bits of flash fiction strung together into a book. That's a plus for me!
December 25, 2025
Very clever and witty dialogue. Formally, the novella is somewhere in between Didion and a best friend’s diary. It brought to mind the diary’s from authors that are published on the Paris Review blog. Lewis writes such sharp sentences; I had to slow down my reading to appreciate them. The ending lingered with me.
August 31, 2025
I loved the writing style of this book. Life told in short imagery of events or feelings. She captured the angst of our mid20s, but somehow in a calming way. I now want to journal about my life in this writing style haha
August 6, 2025
have been chasing this book all over bookstores and finally found it. felt like it only took 20 mins to read the whole thing. do i think i enjoyed it because i am also a 20-something writer living in brooklyn? yes. do i think i would have enjoyed it if those things were not true? perhaps less but still yes. nothing really happens but i don’t mind that. fun and sometimes moving to take in the world as someone else does—all their noticings, the little comments/billboards/whatever we all hear/see every day but that are actually profound when you Think About Them. good tiny little book with good spare writing
November 26, 2025
This book is just so exactly like Substacks that are so exactly like very well written diary entries and I just eat them up like candy bc I love gossip
July 15, 2025
I devoured in one day this smart, witty, concise and somewhat-haunting tale of a 20-something SWF reporter’s life in modern-day Brooklyn.
The reporter goes unnamed. But she tells us she’s a “half-decade in now, at the online outlet” where she works. “I can summarize in no-time-flat the day’s virtual controversy or substantive outrage,” she says. “When I do it just right, hundreds of thousands of people click.”
A pro, no question. The narrator’s pithy, Metropolitan Diary-caliber descriptions of city personalities, at work and play, along with conversation snippets, are very fun.
But when she turns her dispassionate, reporterly gaze on herself — her sex (with boyfriends and flings), takeout meals, family visits, road trips, roommates — it can feel Lena Dunham “Girls”-caliber sad, like the musings of an aimless, commitment-shy womanchild. When the narrator is asked at one point why she failed to take notes on a reporting trip, she wonders aloud: “Self-sabotage?”
Typical of 20-somethings throughout history? Or today’s Gen Z-ers failing to buy into what they see as corny, old-school values? Or just a snapshot of the well-drawn, memorable narrator in Cora Lewis’ unputdownable INFORMATION AGE?
The reporter goes unnamed. But she tells us she’s a “half-decade in now, at the online outlet” where she works. “I can summarize in no-time-flat the day’s virtual controversy or substantive outrage,” she says. “When I do it just right, hundreds of thousands of people click.”
A pro, no question. The narrator’s pithy, Metropolitan Diary-caliber descriptions of city personalities, at work and play, along with conversation snippets, are very fun.
But when she turns her dispassionate, reporterly gaze on herself — her sex (with boyfriends and flings), takeout meals, family visits, road trips, roommates — it can feel Lena Dunham “Girls”-caliber sad, like the musings of an aimless, commitment-shy womanchild. When the narrator is asked at one point why she failed to take notes on a reporting trip, she wonders aloud: “Self-sabotage?”
Typical of 20-somethings throughout history? Or today’s Gen Z-ers failing to buy into what they see as corny, old-school values? Or just a snapshot of the well-drawn, memorable narrator in Cora Lewis’ unputdownable INFORMATION AGE?
December 1, 2025
I think the heart of this novella is captured by an early vignette in which the narrator takes a coworker up on a playful suggestion that they write poems "as an exercise" and sets a deadline for haikus by EOD. The coworker's haiku reads: "Oh god I wasn't / prepared for you to believe / I meant what I said." The narrator ends the chapter wryly observing, "How one judges triviality is a question I haven't yet answered."
Across all five parts of the narrative, "how one judges triviality" is the constant question. Is the fact that neither the narrator nor her friend was willing to sacrifice any pieces in their impromptu chess game at a diner significant? Is it "telling," or just a fact among a billion other inert facts? Are the short news articles she writes significant, or "just the facts"? Again and again, the narrator confronts the reader with a kind of paralysis that results from believing, on one hand, that obviously some things are significant and others trivial and yet, on the other hand, finding it almost impossible most of the time to determine which is which.
That impossibility is what gives the novella its particular form, the vignettes, all written in the "structureless present" (as the narrator describes one moment in part V), held together loosely by chronological time, though the narrator is outside that chronology, able to insert the future casually as needed. In the structureless present, the narrator captures brief scenes in language full of double-meaning, relying on ambiguity to charge the scenes with possible meaning and forcing the reader to determine whether each instance is indeed significant or just a pun.
By the end of the novella, the problem has spread from the world to the narrator, who is searching for a partner who can see them the way the reader sees some of the vignettes, as charged with significance and not just a bit. The narrator wants someone to behold them. They want to be held. The vignettes want the same thing. They ask the reader to "see" them as more than just a string of moments, more than just a "structureless present."
I think the book is good because its form neatly reflects something about its subject, the "information age," and that makes it useful to think with.
Across all five parts of the narrative, "how one judges triviality" is the constant question. Is the fact that neither the narrator nor her friend was willing to sacrifice any pieces in their impromptu chess game at a diner significant? Is it "telling," or just a fact among a billion other inert facts? Are the short news articles she writes significant, or "just the facts"? Again and again, the narrator confronts the reader with a kind of paralysis that results from believing, on one hand, that obviously some things are significant and others trivial and yet, on the other hand, finding it almost impossible most of the time to determine which is which.
That impossibility is what gives the novella its particular form, the vignettes, all written in the "structureless present" (as the narrator describes one moment in part V), held together loosely by chronological time, though the narrator is outside that chronology, able to insert the future casually as needed. In the structureless present, the narrator captures brief scenes in language full of double-meaning, relying on ambiguity to charge the scenes with possible meaning and forcing the reader to determine whether each instance is indeed significant or just a pun.
By the end of the novella, the problem has spread from the world to the narrator, who is searching for a partner who can see them the way the reader sees some of the vignettes, as charged with significance and not just a bit. The narrator wants someone to behold them. They want to be held. The vignettes want the same thing. They ask the reader to "see" them as more than just a string of moments, more than just a "structureless present."
I think the book is good because its form neatly reflects something about its subject, the "information age," and that makes it useful to think with.
December 18, 2025
"We think the point of a kid is to grow up because it does grow up," my father tells me by the sandbox. "But the point of a kid is to play. If you always looked to the end, the point of life would be death."
some beautiful vignettes, particularly around the pace of life and some lovely prose that was reminiscent of didion. not jaw-droppingly profound but a fast and light read. read in one day.
some beautiful vignettes, particularly around the pace of life and some lovely prose that was reminiscent of didion. not jaw-droppingly profound but a fast and light read. read in one day.
September 29, 2025
A novella on womanhood, living and working in nyc, and making a life for oneself.
The style of interconnect vignettes was so interesting to follow and the prose just flowed
The style of interconnect vignettes was so interesting to follow and the prose just flowed
August 24, 2025
very Writers&Lovers
November 11, 2025
I picked this up at McNally Jackson Books in New York and was intrigued by the cover, synopsis, physical size of the book, and first chapter. So I decided to purchase it and read it.
What an interesting, unique, and witty book. It follows a young reporter in her 20s navigating work, love, friends, and life decisions. It’s written over the course of several years in the present tense, and its prose is a series of vignettes, mini-scenes, and slices of life, representative of her job as a reporter of anything that drops on her desk. There were also a ton of clever one-liners littered throughout this novella, many of which I made note of.
The story also read as vacant and matter-of-fact, yet poetic to me, which is a style I absolutely love.
I think the thesis of this book can be generalized through this line, and I appreciated the overall meaning of the book.
Overall, a very interesting read, and I’ll definitely be revisiting this book in the future, especially the tons of underlines I made!
What an interesting, unique, and witty book. It follows a young reporter in her 20s navigating work, love, friends, and life decisions. It’s written over the course of several years in the present tense, and its prose is a series of vignettes, mini-scenes, and slices of life, representative of her job as a reporter of anything that drops on her desk. There were also a ton of clever one-liners littered throughout this novella, many of which I made note of.
Saul tells me variations of “life” now going. His favourite is “the sum of functions by which death is resisted.”
The story also read as vacant and matter-of-fact, yet poetic to me, which is a style I absolutely love.
“I don’t dry dishes… That’s what God is for.”
September. I’ve been taking myself for walks like a dog.
I think the thesis of this book can be generalized through this line, and I appreciated the overall meaning of the book.
What the AI makers may not care to learn is that good writing’s the exception to the statistical norm. It doesn't revert to the meaning. The “most likely next word” is almost always cliché, language, so familiar. It's a void of information.
Overall, a very interesting read, and I’ll definitely be revisiting this book in the future, especially the tons of underlines I made!
Read
December 25, 2025Very charming work of autofiction. Some might call it plotless, though I think that term’s not being used right these days—there’s not a central narrative arc, but plenty happens, and the text is fragmented and open (what the poets call parataxis), leaving you to find your own meanings and centers of gravity—I was intrigued by the narrators abortion and by all the scenes of her journalism job, which made journalism sound just as bullshitty as anything I’ve done. Her life outside it seems idyllic—ripe pluots, strings of charming and good looking lovers, tons of friends and party invites… I started getting fomo for a literary life that looked like this one; it almost felt like Instagram snapshots of a millennial (Gen z?) life in Brooklyn. She’s got a wonderful ear for dialogue.
I did wonder, intermittently, when autofiction as a genre might run its course … it can feel a bit aimless, even when it’s as lovely in execution as this is. Profundity is glanced at rather than worked towards. But still a lovely book and delighted to see Joyland expand into book publishing!!!
I did wonder, intermittently, when autofiction as a genre might run its course … it can feel a bit aimless, even when it’s as lovely in execution as this is. Profundity is glanced at rather than worked towards. But still a lovely book and delighted to see Joyland expand into book publishing!!!
December 21, 2025
Easy to undervalue this book I think
Not the best book ever, and definitely an artifact of the time but I think that’s the point when you call a book Information Age.
Particularly interesting as Lewis was previously a writer at Buzzfeed. Information in this book is structured much like that of our modern era—quick, succinct, maybe somewhat lifeless at times.
That being said, the author does a great job of using her charm and wit to make all these punchy remarks that other books of the time often do (annoyingly so) but never to this degree and mastery.
At the end of the day, this feels human, maybe disappointingly, but I found it deeply reflective of the current state of the world.
This really toes the line between working and not working. And maybe while writing this all, it seems like it’s working. But also, maybe I’ve just been thinking all of these big thoughts
Not the best book ever, and definitely an artifact of the time but I think that’s the point when you call a book Information Age.
Particularly interesting as Lewis was previously a writer at Buzzfeed. Information in this book is structured much like that of our modern era—quick, succinct, maybe somewhat lifeless at times.
That being said, the author does a great job of using her charm and wit to make all these punchy remarks that other books of the time often do (annoyingly so) but never to this degree and mastery.
At the end of the day, this feels human, maybe disappointingly, but I found it deeply reflective of the current state of the world.
This really toes the line between working and not working. And maybe while writing this all, it seems like it’s working. But also, maybe I’ve just been thinking all of these big thoughts
August 2, 2025
I’ve never read something like this before, I loved it! The fragmented snippets into the protagonists life did take some getting used to but I loved the witty, insightful, cutting commentary. There’s a lot to dissect considering it’s so short and the author really makes it so every line is important and vital. Information Age really captures the ephemeral, often crazy nature of your 20’s without it feeling overdone or contrived and I’m sure every 20 year old can see themselves in this book - I certainly did! Considering we dont even know the protagonists name or age, it’s easy to connect and empathise with her which just goes to show how compelling and well-written Information Age is.
October 16, 2025
SIIILEEENNNCEEEEE! A peak millennial, Brooklyn-based, Buzzfeed-contributing, literary fiction author is speaking, and i'm trying to listen.
Such sparse prose, such vivid imagery. Tenuous connections: worker, purpose-seeker, childhood, babysitter, friend, lover, identities all bleeding into each other until we are all at once and none at all. And in your twenties, oh boy, all these things just pileup into each other!
A noun and a verb is a plot. humor that will make you slap your knee, depth that will take your breath away.
You will want to read this book, trust me. Buy one to gift, and one to keep!
Such sparse prose, such vivid imagery. Tenuous connections: worker, purpose-seeker, childhood, babysitter, friend, lover, identities all bleeding into each other until we are all at once and none at all. And in your twenties, oh boy, all these things just pileup into each other!
A noun and a verb is a plot. humor that will make you slap your knee, depth that will take your breath away.
You will want to read this book, trust me. Buy one to gift, and one to keep!
December 24, 2025
Observant, thoughtful and clever (sometimes a bit too clever) this novel in vignettes follows a young woman in her 20s in nyc navigating life post college with roommates, friendships, romantic relationships, family and work. There is poignancy in the writing shown in connections within close relationships and in the seriousness in which this phase of new adulthood is taken by those in the middle of it.
October 17, 2025
Absolutely fantastic. Prose so sweet, yet severe. The vignettes are not quite "connected," but simply moments that draw attention, most often funny quips from strangers, roommates, siblings, lovers. Throughout reading this I had such an intense feeling of calm and longing that I can't quite explain. Perhaps it is because the narrator feels like both myself and a friend — familiar, vague.
August 25, 2025
I would compare Lewis' writing to Lily King's, in the sense that every word is crucial, sparkling, and there are phrases on almost every single page that make me gasp, "oh!". This short work of fiction is stunning, prescient, relatable, gorgeous. I want more.
Source: purchased paperback
Source: purchased paperback
September 7, 2025
+1 star for being a light reading distraction ? dunno have to come back to this because I merged this book with My Salinger Year in my mind and have to re-flip through this book to try to get a sense of it as an actual book in itself
October 22, 2025
She is me, I am her.
Cora Lewis wrote the most ordinary story in the most extraordinary way. If you’re a woman in your mid-late twenties, you will find yourself in Lewis’ pages and you will often laugh, at the characters, and at yourself.
Short and sweet. Loved it.
Cora Lewis wrote the most ordinary story in the most extraordinary way. If you’re a woman in your mid-late twenties, you will find yourself in Lewis’ pages and you will often laugh, at the characters, and at yourself.
Short and sweet. Loved it.
November 1, 2025
A nice quick and easy read that successfully got me out of my book slump. It was very slice-of-life, which is not my usual genre. I enjoyed it nonetheless, but maybe I’ll enjoy anything about a 20-something year-old person in New York that I can relate to.
July 24, 2025
i think the last chapter tipped the scales from 4 to 5 stars
October 2, 2025
it grew on me
November 1, 2025
a novel in mostly short vignettes- you can tell the author worked a buzzfeed- and survived. funny at time, very reporter-like at all times.
Read
November 7, 2025I enjoyed this, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it’s the same book as Patricia Lockwood’s “No One Is Talking About This.”
Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews