A book that makes you think Kafka filtered through late-industrial paranoia, or urban alienation before it had branding.

Each story in this book proposes a future already quietly present in the architecture of modern life. The effect is cumulative: a slow erosion of the idea that progress is inevitable or even desirable.

Sternberg writes short, sharp dystopian pieces. Full of fragments, sketches, places where bureaucracies swell, people shrink and everything seems to hum without meaning. The tone is dry, ironic, occasionally absurd — but never comforting.

It’s bleak, but intellectually playful. Very 1970s European pessimism, in pocket form.

First edition, good condition.