"Anne-Marie Kinney’s debut novel, Radio Iris, is a great book because it doesn’t try to hide what it is: a stark, unapologetic, piercing story about an emotionally bereft young person with a shitty job. This kind of story has been told before. And this is the kind of story that young writers are discouraged from writing—both in MFA programs and by the publishing industry, because too many have already been written, because too many have been written badly, because too many people with shitty jobs were too certain their stories were special. This is the kind of story that I once tried to write, and ultimately, shied away from, because doing it right is extremely difficult. But Kinney doesn’t shy away. Seeing past the low end of the shitty job genre, knowing the tradition’s better half, from Bartleby the Scrivener to The Trial to Tropic of Capricorn, Kinney doesn’t resort to contrivances to conceal the fact that she’s writing about a young woman who, living a life of corporate purposelessness and monotony, becomes isolated, numbed up, and deadened. Kinney doesn’t try to pretend that her story is something it isn’t, she doesn’t dress her story in a false uniqueness, and because she doesn’t, because she writes with so much self-assurance, what comes through is not a fabricated singularity, but a true singularity, one forged by Kinney’s forlorn and surreal voice, patience and subtlety with plot, and close attention to character."