Flux (Melville House; on sale March 21st, 2023) is a dazzling, time-bending debut by Jinwoo Chong that blends elements of neo-noir and speculative fiction. Flux is a blazingly original work for fans of Ling Ma’s Severance and William Gibson’s Neuromancer.
More about the book: Four days before Christmas, 28-year-old Brandon loses his job after a hostile takeover of his big-media employer. His boss Gil, who he is sleeping with, shares this news along with a severance check. Elsewhere, eight-year-old Bo loses his mother in a tragic accident, and forty-eight-year-old Blue, a key witness in a criminal trial against an infamous tech startup, struggles to reconnect with his family. When Brandon gets a mysterious new job, he begins to suspect that his employers have inadvertently discovered time travel and are using it to cover up a string of violent crimes. As his reality unravels, the lives of all three characters begin to intersect, and a vast network of secrets is uncovered. Flux is a haunting and sometimes shocking exploration of the cyclical nature of grief, of moving past trauma, and of the pervasive nature of whiteness within the development of Asian identity in America from a powerful new voice in fiction.
Jinwoo Chong received an MFA from Columbia University. His short stories have appeared in The Southern Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Salamander. He lives in New York.