Book excerpt: Fiction. "In this joyful critique of a Randian, post-industrial society, Mathias Svalina comments on both the compulsive desire to make the inconsumable and the often intangible recalcitrance of our attempts to create something useful in a world increasingly characterized by a manufactured sense of lack, anomie and disaffection, where we are daily beset by 'a kind of numbness, a shadow of desire or fear offset against a blank world.' Svalina refuses this numbness and offers something else, something completely stunning, in its place"—Gabriel Gudding. "This is a subversive and necessary book: the quixotic entrepreneurial spirit of individualist American capitalism is revealed as an inherently poetic construct, one that rests on theater, liminality, imaginative drive, contradiction, and failure. I AM A VERY PRODUCTIVE ENTREPRENEUR is poignant and brilliant; it's worth the investment"—Christian Hawkey.