Thank you to Emily Gref and Grace Ross for their invaluable professional counsel.

Thank you to Joshua Weil, Clare Beams, and my workshop at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference as well as my fellow waiters for becoming such warm friends and readers: ’Pemi Aguda, Daphne Palasi Andreades, Afua Ansong, Taneum Bambrick, Erica Berry, Noah Bogdonoff, Michaela Cowgill, Dolapo Demuren, Jonathan Escoffery, Vince Granata, Taylor Koekkoek, Jaime Lalinde, Grace You Li, Rachel Mannheimer, Alex McElroy, Josha Jay Nathan, Sebastian Paramo, Anne Price, Zoë Ruiz, Laurie Thomas, Morgan Thomas, and De’Shawn Winslow.

To my parents, my deepest gratitude for raising me and giving me the encouragement and hope that I could pursue this dream to become a writer. Thank you for providing me with a home and making my life possible.

To Andrew Parker, thank you for being such a source of strength, for your unwavering belief in me and my career, and for your love.

Praise for You Will Never Be Forgotten

“Mary South gets it. With dark humor, she knocks down like so many lined-up ducks all the consoling pieties that nurture humanist fiction, and sets up in their place a version of subjects irremediably mediated, strung out along networks that far exceed them. Her universe is glitchy, full of weakly encrypted memory, open-source desire, self-replicating fantasy: the human in hock to the algorithm.”

—Tom McCarthy, author of Satin Island

“Mary South’s stories are a vital mix of wry humor, cunning provocation, disturbing prophecy, and deep feeling. A brilliant and brilliantly strange and strangely funny and menacing debut!”

—Sam Lipsyte, author of Hark and The Ask

“Mary South’s wickedly, exquisitely hilarious collection dwells in the intimate aches of modern life, writ large in strange, delightful stories that include, but are not limited to, clones, brain surgery, internet trolls, and warehouses full of spare men. Dazzlingly imagined and full of wit, You Will Never Be Forgotten is a gift to readers everywhere, a ferocious transmission from one of the most audacious, most original new voices in fiction.”

—Alexandra Kleeman, author of Intimations and You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“While Mary South’s stories feature the cutting-edge technology of our present and near future, what makes this collection so exceptional is the deft hand with which she can peel back the sheen of novelty to get to the core of these characters’ triumphs and struggles. With sharp insight and wit, South lays bare the timeless truths of love, loss, and loneliness at the heart of these stories.”

—Sara Nović, author of Girl at War

“One of the strangest and most exciting collections I’ve read in recent times. This is what I hope for from speculative fiction: an unease that pulls you through the story with urgency but also delivers new formations of haunting questions that linger long after the story ends.”

—Jac Jemc, author of The Grip of It

“This is a delicious, absurdly sharp collection of stories—funny, painful, macabre, sometimes gruesome, and humming with intelligence. Mary South is a tremendous talent and this book is a gem.”

—Lydia Kiesling, author of Golden State

“What a heady, delicious, devastating collection. These stories, in their limitless wit and invention, begin as satisfying intellectual puzzles and then bloom into something fiercer, wilder—expanding to contain the fullness of dread, loss, longing, shame, terror. Mary South has written a tremendous book.”

—Clare Beams, author of The Illness Lesson

“Here are ten stories of loneliness and loss, bristling with gallows humor and wrought of nimble, gleefully exacting sentences. With wide-reaching curiosity and deadpan wit, Mary South writes the absurdity and banality of technology-damaged life.”

—Kathryn Scanlan, author of Aug 9—Fog

“These swift and spiky stories dive, unafraid, into grief and violence—and emerge with insights as vivid and powerful as a lightning strike. You Will Never Be Forgotten is an arresting, unpredictable, and hilarious collection, and Mary South is an ingenious new talent.”

—Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel