An eight-year-old poses as a pregnant mother of four on a baby name message board. A college dropout delivers Cabbage Patch births at a roadside attraction. A lonely regular chases high scores on a dive bar’s Erotic Photo Hunt game. A cave girl is raised by an influencer mother. Told with tenderness and precision, these linked stories hum with the strange holiness of coming-of-age. This unforgettable debut captures the ache of growing up online and in the South—when the internet was weird, hypnotic, and resided in the glow of the family computer room.
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The Computer Room oozes ambient warmth laced with humor and pricked with delightful bursts of weirdness. From the punk show to the recovery blog to tradwife TikTok to the dive bar--from the tenderly nostalgic to the giddily speculative--Ensley delicately excavates the digital and deeply human ties that bind us.
- Aiden Arata, author of You Have A New Memory
These thriteen short stories have made me more homesick than I’ve been in years. For Bojangles, old babysitting gigs, and weekend drives with my very own red-headed crush on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Ensley’s debut is self-assured; a sudden squall of warm air blowing open the screen-door of a brief and bygone southern adolescence. With dual perfect attention to the Carolina landscape and Tumblr 90s nostalgia, The Computer Room puts forward a glittering mosaic portrait of small-town girlhood. With a weird and tender imagination on full display, Ensley emerges right on time. The ease of her storytelling is exuberant.
- Grace Ezra, Editor-in-Chief of Hood of Bone Review
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