Alena Graedon

Alena Graedon's debut turns anxiety about language and technology into an intimate literary mystery. The Word Exchange imagines a near future in which handheld Memes have displaced books, newspapers, and much of ordinary vocabulary. Anana Johnson works with her father on the final print edition of a major dictionary, but his disappearance draws her into a search that unfolds alongside a spreading language disorder. Doubleday introduced the work in 2014, followed by a Vintage paperback. The book's speculative premise is grounded in Graedon's experience around literary institutions: she worked at Knopf and PEN, studied at Brown University and Columbia's MFA program, and later taught at Columbia. Rather than treating words as decorative details, The Word Exchange makes their loss central to memory, trust, and human connection. Its combination of technological dystopia, bibliographic clues, and a daughter's concern for her father explains why the novel is often described as both speculative fiction and a bibliothriller.