Panopticon

"Bajo is a demanding writer who does not go out of his way to make sure the reader is crystal-clear about everything that is going on. But his work does not require decoding or deconstructing so much as it requires diligence. You have to sit up and pay attention when you read Panopticon; the book is perplexing because the mystery Klinsman unravels is perplexing. Bajo rarely resorts to pyrotechnic prose, but he never writes a sentence that disappoints the reader. The story advances by leaps and starts, but it does not meander. Panopticon, paying affectionate homage to everyone from Jorge Luis Borges to Aldous Huxley to Jim Thompson to J.G. Ballard, is in this sense a mildly futuristic science-fiction novel written by someone who can actually write. Unbridled Books, which puts out a handful of beautifully packaged literary novels of this sort every year, continues to keep the lights flickering in a culture that is growing dimmer by the minute."--The Globe and Mail "An ethereal, well-crafted, and quietly disturbing novel, a book that slices creepily through its characters' pasts to uncover aspects of a technologically warped present that are equally riveting and unnerving because of their pervasiveness. It's a story about a journalist from the California borderlands whose life has been sucked up and morphed by the Internet and the geeks who control it. The dusty and scalded landscape of Blood Meridian choked by the icy, collectivist arm of Nineteen Eighty-Four. It's a trip."--The Brooklyn Rail