The Birds Know the Ending

About this book

Odile Marchetti reviews books for money that arrives late, and grades them on a private scale she has never explained to anyone: A minus is a love letter, B plus is a warning. In her city of freelancers and half-finished manuscripts, a starling on a laundromat vent says a sentence she cannot place. Then another bird says another. None of them belong to any published book. Odile does what she knows how to do. She treats it as an assignment: voice, pacing, originality, continuity. The trail leads to a rooftop where a machine reads its own uncommissioned novels aloud to nobody, and to a small press that would very much like to print whatever the birds are saying before anyone decides who wrote it. The books are uneven in a human way, which is a problem. One of them has a critic in it who keeps a list of birds, which is a worse one.