'Wonderful' Anna Wiener, author of Uncanny Valley

'By turns hilarious and sobering, this slim gem of a book chronicles the Silicon Valley way of life... full of delicately profound insights into work, money, love, and the search for a life that matters' Newsweek

The cult classic memoir of the California tech scene

As digital culture explodes into mainstream society in 1990s San Francisco, the intersections between people and technology become exponentially more complex. Programmer Ellen Ullman's cult classic memoir offers a coder's-eye view of the new world and its inhabitants.

In stunning, humane and prescient prose, Ullman describes the strange ecstasies of programming and the even stranger social dynamics of the emerging California tech scene, where the efficiencies of code can never be purged of the bugs of human desire.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Ellen Ullman's Close to the Machine, a memoir of her time as a software engineer during the early years of the internet revolution, became a cult classic and established her as a writer of considerable talent; with her second book, The Bug, she became an acclaimed novelist; By Blood, her second novel, is also published by Pushkin Press. She lives in San Francisco.

"Astonishing... impossible to put down" - San Francisco Chronicle

"A classic of twentieth-century digital culture literature... Part memoir, part techie mantra, part observation on the ever-changing world of computer science...[Ullman is] a strong woman standing up to, and facing down, 'obsolescence' in two different, particularly unforgiving worlds-modern technology and modern society" - New York Times Book Review

"By turns hilarious and sobering, this slim gem of a book chronicles the Silicon Valley way of life... full of delicately profound insights into work, money, love, and the search for a life that matters" - Newsweek

"Close to the Machine may be the best---it's certainly the most human---book to have emerged thus far from the culture of Silicon Valley. Ullman is that rarity, a computer programmer with a poet's feeling for language" - Salon

"We see the seduction at the heart of programming: embedded in the hijinks and hieroglyphics are the esoteric mysteries of the human mind" - Wired