Adam Gnade's pocketsize novel The Internet Newspaper is about working at the online version of a daily newspaper during the weird, clumsy, well-funded early days of the internet. Set in Southern California in the year 2000, Gnade's book shows an America that doesn't exist anymore--an awkward, wild, innocent place that has since given way to fury and regression.

Here we bear witness to HTML coding and late-night party crime, hard drugs, and the birth of the "cats on the internet" phenomenon. The Internet Newspaper is lyrical, dark, philosophical, and true like all good fiction is true.

Recommended if you like: Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney, Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, Sex and Rage by Eve Babitz, Bright Eyes, The Cure, Mexican food, committing crime, being a fucking badass, and Patti Smith's Just Kids.