Tope Folarin

In July of this year, a U.S.-based company called CrowdStrike released an update for its widely used cybersecurity software, inadvertently triggering a massive system crash. In the hours that followed, what has since been described as the “largest outage in history” affected nearly every facet of our global society. On X, the phrase Leave the world behind went viral.

Justin Torres’s debut novel, We the Animals, quickly became a cultural phenomenon when it was published in 2011, the kind of novel that appeared on social-media feeds and celebrity reading lists. The book is a marvel—it is slim and ferocious, and proceeds at a relentless pace, as if exhaled in a single breath.