“Vara’s essays are beautifully written and profoundly researched, but what sets them apart is their profound vulnerability. Her use of experimental forms . . . pushes the limits of the genre without ever compromising her circumspective, confessional approach. An original essay collection about loss, technology, morality, and identity.”
—Kirkus, starred review
"Searches is that rare thing: a genuinely thrilling book that breaks open existing forms and structures to offer something entirely new. Vara brings the rigor of a reporter and the exhilarating impulses of an artist into this extraordinary, sui generis book: with wit, insight, tenderness, humility, and clear-eyed candor, she explores the wild frontiers of what our lives have already become. The stakes are high. The ride is terrifying and illuminating at once. This book will leave you changed and stay with you for good."
—Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story
"I cannot imagine a better guide through the infuriating, labyrinthine underworld of technology than Vauhini Vara. Searches is so many things—heart-stoppingly sad, a formal high-wire act, a wise and funny and thoughtful encyclopedia of our modern age—but most of all it is a book about human relationships: how imperfectly we made this thing that connects us, and how we might use this thing to re-meet ourselves and each other."
— Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House
“What an original, expansive, epic achievement. I've been waiting for a follow-up to Vauhini Vara's magazine piece ‘Ghosts,’ where she introduced us to a new machine-based technology — a predecessor to ChatGPT — that had the potential to replace writers like herself. What she's delivered in Searches is a riveting, provocative and deeply personal exploration of our ambivalent relationship with technology that spans from our earliest history to the advent of the internet to the race to dominate artificial intelligence. This is a book that will challenge your notions of what it means to be human, investigating our quest for connection and understanding of our place in the world when technology is getting devilishly good at mimicking us. There is no one better to tell this story than Vauhini Vara, with her deeply engaging personal narratives, infused with curiosity and humor, who has grown up with the internet and sat in the front row as the captains of Big Tech brought us the technologies that now permeate our lives. This book doesn't lead you to a simple and automatic conclusion. In perhaps the most human of qualities, it will make you continue to question, to search.”
— Cecilia Kang, co-author of An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination and award-winning New York Times technology and policy reporter
“Searches picks up where Vauhini Vara’s impressive first novel, The Immortal King Rao, left off; this new book deepens, complicates, and amplifies her ongoing investigation into the nature of artificial intelligence, especially in relationship to the human body, mortality, sorrow, and grief. Blessedly free of cant or posture and extremely knowledgeable about (and acutely conscious of its complicity in) the networks it’s mapping, Searches is Vara’s best and most compelling book yet.”
—David Shields, author of Reality Hunger
“In Searches, the novelist Vauhini Vara gives us a thought-provoking exploration of our age of digital networks and AI. A seemingly omnipresent observer of this revolution, she takes us on a journey from middle-school chat rooms in 1990s Oklahoma, to an early, pre-OpenAI interview with Sam Altman, to her wary interactions with the then-new, not-yet-public AI model GPT-3 as she seeks to make sense of a youthful trauma that won’t go away. Searches defies simple, familiar narrative at every turn, rendering a compelling warning of how our technology both connects and commodifies us, molding our understanding of our world and ourselves.”
—David A. Price, author of Geniuses at War and The Pixar Touch
