Cora Lewis: On Navigating Connection and Disconnection, Capturing Millennial Life and Information Overload, the Art of Presence, and Her Debut Novella ‘Information Age’
Another friend of mine announces an Instagram break, a candid photo showcasing she will be offline for the summer. It’s a familiar gesture, both earnest and performative, part of a broader desire to disconnect, to reclaim attention, to resist the pace of digital life even as we narrate our resistance in real time. I’m guilty of it too, this impulse to extricate myself from the online current, to step away from the endless feed. I even captioned an IG post with, “brb, trying to live in the moment,” sporting an emoji of fingers giving the peace sign and a mobile phone with a red strike through it.
In Information Age (Joyland Editions, 2025), Cora Lewis captures this paradox with precision. Through a collage of vignettes following a young journalist at the height of the 2010s media churn, the novella explores what it means to live and work under constant notification: to report the news while being consumed by it, to long for quiet while posting through the chaos. This is a story of attempting presence in an age that rewards velocity, of trying to feel something true amid the scroll.
The narrative follows her movement between the charged, public spaces of newsrooms, campaign trails, and press conferences, and the more intimate terrain of friendships, romantic entanglements, shared apartments, and family ties. As crises multiply—wildfires, mass shootings, the spread of misinformation—she grapples with romantic ambiguity, the looming question of motherhood, burnout, and the quiet ache for meaning and connection. Keenly perceptive and emotionally layered, Information Age dissolves the lines between journalism and personal reflection, offering a portrait of a woman trying to stay human in an age of relentless information.
I found the book hopeful. The internet is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future, but what can evolve are the ways we show up for one another offline. This story suggests that even in an age of constant connectivity and noise, it’s possible to still be known, cared for, and loved.
Brittany Ackerman: I love, love, loved this book. It felt like reading a contemporary version of Seinfeld, like if Elaine Benes had a spinoff and she worked in media! I mean this in that the book focuses on the minutiae of everyday life, capturing personal dramas and cultural absurdities (and beauties!) without a traditional plot arc.
How did you avoid plot, if that’s what your intention was, and how do you feel the book does without it?
Cora Lewis: Thank you so much for this! An extremely generous and astute intro. I so appreciate your gloss on what the book is doing, and that you found it hopeful.
As to the lack of traditional plot, and how the book does without it—I do think it manages! It pulls one along, on the sentence level, is the hope. But I would say that, wouldn’t I. When I step back, there does seem to be at least a significant series of events—between the protagonist’s relationships, work, family life, and all the happenings that come with growing older—but I agree it’s a quiet, understated version of the thing… More sitcom-about-nothing or limited series than a taut, two-hour drama. And there certainly isn't a plot in the straightforward, conventional Freytag’s pyramid way—the ‘exposition, rising action, climax, denouement, resolution’ I sometimes teach when I teach short stories.
I didn’t consciously set out to sideline plot, but the avoidance did become part of the style of the book—that choice to treat big and small happenings with similar attention—the personal, political, mundanities and minutiae, as you say. And I think that creates an effect that I felt good about. A leveling. Which all became part of the commentary on how people make and metabolize information and experience.
My editor, Madeleine Crum, also said something that has stayed with me, which is the idea that “story” is simply change over time, and I think the book has a considerable amount of that.
BA: This book feels akin to a novel I read last year, The Skunks by Fiona Warnick, in regards to the gentle nudge of adulthood. There is a sort of vignette structure, an exploration of millennial burnout, a blend of irony and vulnerability in portraying intimate everyday moments.
I wish there were a proper term for books like this, because it’s not “coming-of-age.” It’s more like “rising adult” (sounds too pornographic maybe) or “the long becoming” (too serious!?). “A season of becoming!” !
How would you describe your writing, or the “rising adult” genre that captures writing that embodies this soft ushering into adult life, this gradual reckoning of responsibility?
CL: I think Fiona Warnick is such a talented writer—thank you for that comparison! And I agree, there’s a whole set of these books about people in their twenties, determining what the patterns for their lives will be, and how those might differ from their parents’ lives and grandparents’ lives in significant ways, with a new set of pressures and expectations. I do think the genre has a gradual quality, and a gentleness—Rachel Khong’s Goodbye, Vitamin, which is also in vignettes, comes to mind. Even Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This, or Jenny Offill’s Weather, in which the brother character is figuring out how to live… I think Nancy Lemann’s Lives of the Saints and some of Susan Minot’s stories fit the bill too. In a sense, it’s a timeless bildungsroman, but stretched out for the modern era.
BA: I feel confident that you’ll remember in the pilot episode of Girls when Hannah Horvath proclaimed to her parents, “I think that I may be the voice of my generation. Or at least, a voice of a generation.”
The narrator in Information Age feels like both a sharp observer and someone drifting through her own life. Did you see her as a stand-in for a generation—the voice of a generation—or more of an individual portrait? Do you think a generation shapes the writing, or that writing shapes the generation?
CL: Oh, man, it’s got to be both… I do think I wrote this character more as an individual portrait, and as an observer of herself, her peers, of the various generations around her, and the “times,” rather than as a stand-in or composite for people her age during that time. I love the idea of writing something like Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything or Mary McCarthy’s The Group, which pull that sort of thing off, the way Girls aimed to more—or Sex and the City. I read that Jaffe did a lot of interviews and research for hers, which seems like a responsible way to do that sort of project. And I did realize later in the process of writing the book that the character can be frustrating in the ways she does drift through her life, or is more passive than she could be. That was interesting to notice, and it’s probably one reason she could be less representative of a whole generation. More Nick Carraway than Gatsby.
I was also shaped by the writing I consumed as I wrote this book, and prior… Which included some books that I do think get at many of the feelings and experiences I was trying to capture, too. Including Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, and Annie Ernaux. That candor, and their openness about drawing from life.
BA: Information Age is structured in vignettes—fragmented, almost diaristic. You evoke the experience of being online without ever being heavy-handed. There’s a subtle, skillful balance between vulnerability and reportage that you capture with remarkable grace.
How did you approach writing about digital life in a literary style?
CL: Thank you so much for that. I do think the fragmented vignettes help convey the nature of digital life—scrolling a newsfeed of headlines, or a Twitter (X dot com) feed of people one knows and doesn’t know, Instagram posts of one’s personal life, family life, and the news again… I do include a Reddit board message, an email or two, text messages, a quiz, and other assorted forms to more directly mimic the experience of being online on the page… But ultimately it is, of course, a book—an analog, dead-tree piece of media, and the scenes interspersed have that literary quality to balance out too much of that online energy… In some ways, I tried to impose a little of each on the other, I think. Editing and curating in that way, so that the two feel less opposed and more of apiece. It’s funny—Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights and Renata Adler’s Speedboat and Vivian Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City also all use the vignette structure, despite being written before the rise of the internet, and so in some ways the style may just reflect the fragmented nature of contemporary life, rather than digital life in particular.
BA: Saul is a recurring character who represents a kind of emotional anchor in the narrator’s otherwise fragmented and overstimulated life. While the novella resists a traditional arc, Saul serves as a touchstone, as someone the narrator shares history and ambiguity with. He’s not drawn as a fixed love interest or simple foil, as he embodies the complicated emotional terrain of millennial relationships that reflects the book’s broader themes of intimacy in an always-online world.
At one point, Saul says to the narrator that it sounds like she’s experiencing a “profound alienation from the production and dissemination of information.”
The narrator is constantly surrounded by information, yet often in search of intimacy. What interests you about that tension?
CL: I do think that tension animates the book and, frankly, my life and the lives of many people I know. In many ways, we know—or “know”—more than ever. Those tropes about having all the world’s knowledge in our hands, instantly. The idea that we can communicate across the world so easily, and that we’re beamed images and words and footage in near-real-time from all over the planet… That’s been true for decades, but our generation grew up with an even more extreme version of it.
Does all that make us closer or wiser? What does it do to our relationships and the way we process what we read, see, and hear?
They’re questions people have asked about every technological advancement—writing, the printing press, radio, TV, the internet… ChatGPT. I’m not a doomsayer or a pessimist, I don’t think. I’m probably neutral-to-hopeful (maybe to a fault), in that there have been these periods of fear and adjustment before—in news and in interpersonal communication. Cellphones. There do seem to be particular arrogances related to the world of tech and AI that are worrisome right now. And the polarization of news, the lack of media literacy with the rise of social media… But it does interest me.
The distance or disconnect between, say, information and knowledge, or information and intimacy or connection. Information and understanding. One might think they would simply go along with one another, but so often they don’t, and that opens up really interesting spaces. Sometimes funny ones, or sad ones, or dangerous ones, or lyrical ones. What do we still fail to communicate? I do think people read literature to find out how other people live, because it can be an intimate document of that… I know I do.
BA: “After a downpour, the greenery’s lush. We cross bridges in cloud cover, come upon vistas, drive through misty tunnels lit with orange light under mountains.”
The narrator is often traveling for work or taking trips away from her desk to go be in nature. She is so in tune with the natural world when she allows herself to be. In what ways does Information Age contrast the rhythms of the natural world with the surge of technological life, and what does that contrast reveal about the narrator’s search for grounding?
Can a meaningful connection to nature coexist with a life saturated in screens, data, and digital noise—or does one inevitably eclipse the other?
CL: I do hope so! If anything, the juxtaposition between the two seems to heighten the qualities of each, in my experience. I wish I spent more time in nature, and it makes me glad the character seems at times to be in tune with the natural world… I did want to capture the way an urban life and office work can become claustrophobic, and reporting trips “in the field” or time upstate are interjections of life, color, and air. I appreciate your connecting that to her search for grounding—a steadiness or source of stability while spending so much time “in the cloud” or the digital world. Touching grass, as they say.
BA: I am always looking for books with Jewish characters, or Jewishness in prose in any capacity. So I wonder, culturally, spiritually, or through the lens of intergenerational experience, what role does her Jewish identity play in shaping the protagonist’s sense of belonging, anxiety, or moral responsibility?
CL: Yes! In fact Judaism had previously been a bigger part of the book, and became more of a grace note as time went on. I see this character as primarily culturally Jewish, and so she does take part in some rituals and holidays, but there’s a secular, assimilated nature to that as well. And the inclusion of some of the grandmother’s experience feels relevant there, when it comes to the generations, as you mention. Belonging, anxiety, and moral responsibility are all parts of the character’s culture of Judaism, I would say, yes—along with probably various kinds of guilt, neuroticism, and bookishness.
BA: Last question, and perhaps a big one. When the narrator interviews an engineer for a freelance article, she asks:
“In a way, aren’t we all just statistical text generators?”
The engineer’s response is beautiful, and readers will have to read to see what it is, but what is your response here? Are we all just statistical text generators in this information age?
CL: I would have to say, coyly, I agree with the engineer’s answer in the book on this one. But, less coyly, I’d say—even when one does one’s best to introduce unpredictability into the statistical generators, as they are now, to incorporate character or personality or the texture and friction of human thought, there are elements of human experience they will simply never access. Often the very things that constitute intimacy, as you mentioned. It leads to some of the most poignant exchanges with ChatGPT, in fact, when one asks about their thoughts on these sorts of things—sensory experience, bodily experiences, and emotional experiences, like friendship and love. So, on some level we might be statistical generators, but we are also in bodies, and in the world, and that’s a great deal more.
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Cora Lewis is a writer and reporter whose fiction has appeared at The Yale Review, Joyland Magazine, Epiphany, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and her BA from Yale. Information Age, her first work of fiction, was published in July 2025 by Joyland Editions. Her website is cora-lewis.com.
