I Made This Just for You (Chris Ames, Ultimo)

Chris Ames’s short story collection, I Made This Just for You, is an astonishing debut and a highly anticipated one after winning the 2025 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. Jumping from California to Indiana to familiar landmarks in Melbourne, these stories chart everyday travails – working, parenting, grieving, ageing – but with the dial turned up to 11 in a dystopian, AI-powered corporate hellscape that feels uncomfortably close to the present. As the line between absurdity and normalcy grows increasingly porous, Ames’s nightmarish scenarios retain unmistakable kernels of truth about modern life. A voiceover artist auditions to become “the most ubiquitous sound on Earth”. A depressed woman competes with a doppelgänger made of hair, oil and fat for control of her own life. A sinking island, propped up by trash, struggles to stay afloat. Elsewhere, an older woman begins leaking from every orifice as her husband struggles to care for her. Ames writes with a wickedly sardonic, frenetic energy, repurposing empty aphorisms (“I don’t dream of labour”) and endlessly circulated memes (“man who slowly backpedals into a hedge to avoid confrontation”) into biting satire. The collection lampoons the futility of the knowledge economy, the suffocating aesthetics of uniformity, the alienation wrought by capitalism, and the straitjacket of toxic masculinity. This collection is for the perennially online among us and will appeal to readers of Julie Koh, Wayne Marshall and Alex Cothren.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Sonia Nair is a Melbourne-based writer and critic. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Books+Publishing pre-publication reviews are supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

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