Book excerpt: After a series of unpublished books, a novelist becomes obsessed with the idea of uploading his consciousness into a cloud and asks a former student to document his efforts ("Encomium of Glass"). A brilliant but melancholy young architect travels to Ukraine with a colleague after the fall of the iron curtain and finds himself in a graveyard of Soviet monuments ("Suedehead"). And after being released from an Egyptian prison, a deprogrammed Islamist has a strange encounter one night at the MoMA ("The Lovers"). These are just a few of the pieces that make up The Unified Field of Loneliness. From Paris, to New York, to Vienna, to London, these ten stories locate characters living in a condition of terror, solipsism and displacement in the technological age.