Mateo Askaripour

Black Buck opens with a twenty-two-year-old working the counter of a Manhattan coffee shop and ends somewhere much stranger, having passed through a start-up sales floor that treats indoctrination as onboarding. Askaripour worked in exactly that world, running sales at a Manhattan technology company before quitting to write, and the novel is built as a manual addressed to the reader, with lessons closing the chapters. The satire is broad on purpose and the anger underneath it is not. It became an American bestseller and a Read with Jenna pick. He writes from Brooklyn.