A portrait of creative stagnation, digital saturation, and the strange, sideways momentum of post-modern life.

Laura has just received a prestigious grant to write her debut novel, and everyone around her agrees that things seem to finally be falling into place for her. Instead, she finds herself increasingly numb and detached from reality—half-heartedly meeting up with friends at the gym, struggling to fulfil her role as a daughter, and managing an abstract relationship with a married man. Haunted by lingering memories of a toxic youth she can’t escape, Laura is stuck in a strange limbo, unable to draw a cohesive plot for her life, her hopes, or her future.

Wry, elliptical, and intimate, Physical Education perfectly captures the quiet absurdities of the algorithmic age and the familiar ways in which we scroll, strive, sweat, and stall our way through the world. A smart, emotionally resonant work for readers of Jillian Tamaki’s Boundless and The Hard Tomorrow by Eleanor Davis.