All posts tagged: Jem

I Want You to Be Happy by Jem Calder: the excruciating millennial novel everyone will be reading this summer

I Want You to Be Happy by Jem Calder: the excruciating millennial novel everyone will be reading this summer

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter The cover of Jem Calder’s I Want You to Be Happy, one of the most talked-about debut novels of the year, is swathed in phrases that would make a Victorian man very confused. Slack. For you page. Last seen. Voice note. WFH. Small plates. Bookshop tote. The book’s likely millennial and Gen Z audience, though, are well versed in this parlance. These are the words that summon the onslaught-iness of modern life. Here, communication is instant, constant, but also faceless. Culture is funnelled through algorithms and trendy viral merch. It has become normal to pay £14 for a caramelised hispi cabbage. Calder evokes this bleak state of affairs in his pages with a deft humour, his characters trapped in an eternal quest to optimise their lives, drowning in overwhelm while also trying to deal with the weird, messy stuff of just …

‘I don’t know what could top that’: debut author Jem Calder on being discovered by Sally Rooney | Fiction

‘I don’t know what could top that’: debut author Jem Calder on being discovered by Sally Rooney | Fiction

Published by Sam Flores

Jem Calder’s writing career had a fairytale start. Sally Rooney emailed him, impressed with a short story he’d submitted to the literary magazine she was editing soon after Conversations with Friends came out. It was the first story he’d ever completed. Calder was already “a huge fan” of Rooney’s, so the whole thing was surreal, he tells me. “I can’t really imagine what could top that, to be honest.” That story ultimately ended up in Reward System, Calder’s 2022 collection of six interconnected tales following a cast of sad young things living in an unnamed city. It was hailed as a book of the year; a review in this paper placed Calder among “the most talented young writers of fiction at work today”. Now, his debut novel, I Want You to Be Happy, picks up some of the themes of the first book: the trials of modern love, millennial ennui, consumer culture, technology, political and ecological doom. And it’s already got some famous fans: David Szalay has sung its praises, while Andrew O’Hagan says Calder is his “new favourite writer”. At the …