A Belletrist Book Club Pick
“Vara journeys through the evolution of the internet, ethical quandaries surrounding AI, and her own life with her characteristically piercing, yet unadorned prose. . . . at once genre-defying and gripping.”—The Washington Post
“A complicated and many-sided book. . . . Searches has many things to recommend it. Vara has a congenial style and, her nose to the zeitgeist, good stories to tell.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“In a growing lineage of books critiquing the power that tech titans wield over our physical world, Searches stands out for emphasizing how they’ve also shaped our private psychological terrain. Vara treats her own life as a vehicle to recount the disquieting history of the internet—or perhaps the other way around. . . . This seamless blend of personal narrative and systemic critique parallels Vara’s subject: technology that has made it feel impossible to compose a self and a society without it.”—The Atlantic
“Mesmerizing.”—Vanity Fair
“Vara demonstrates how our instinctual need for connection and our biological desire for convenience drive our use of technology and, in turn, leave us open to exploitation. . . . Searches is skillfully executed, benefiting as it does from [her] long experience as a tech reporter for The Wall Street Journal and her considerable gifts as a fiction writer. . . . [Vara shows] that, however advanced Internet technology may become, it cannot capture the beauty and mystery of being human.”—Laila Lalami, The Nation
“Vara is an appealing narrator—smart, funny, honest.” —The New Yorker
“I can’t think of a book I’ve read in recent memory that I think about as often as I do this one.”—Cultured
“Vara consistently applies her own deliberate curiosity to the implications of innovation. Crucially, she brings a gimlet eye, sharpened by her journalism background, to the enthusiastic claims of technology evangelists. . . . In the face of all the technology, Searches’ least mediated observations remain its most haunting.”—Alta
“[Vara] is equipped to take on these issues to an almost uncanny degree. . . . Searches is as discomfiting as it is entertaining, with Vara exercising playful technique as a writer while also laying down dire warnings about a tech-dominated future. It’s also a clear reminder that, at least for now, nothing can make language sing like a gifted human mind.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Vara braids an account of the internet as industry into a more intimate portrait of its effect on her own life. And then she asks the most salient question of all: Whose desires will the internet ultimately reflect—ours or theirs?”—Laura Miller, Slate
“Easily the most emotional – and emotionally honest – book written about AI and tech.”—Granta
“Vara urges readers to think about the digital landscape in new and challenging ways.” —Bustle
“Thought-provoking, accessible and compelling. . . . Will have you questioning what you thought you knew about technology in the 21st century.”—Ms. Magazine
“Compelling . . . Vara is interested in what we can tell about ourselves from the digital detritus we leave in our wake, about how much of our privacy we’ve given up to technology. She’s making a case for the idea that human beings have yet to become obsolete — but the possibilities for what technology can bring us too, she suggests, cannot be overlooked.”—Vox
“Part performance art, part social commentary, this is the book about AI and creativity I’ve been waiting for.” —Book Riot
“Vara probes whether it’s possible to reclaim a more humane, thoughtful relationship with technology.” —Electric Literature
“A fascinating read. Neither a manifesto nor a guide to AI, the book is a genre unto itself: part memoir, part chatbot experiment, part meditation on the complexities of language and communication, part critique of the technology industry, part confession of her succumbing to its commercial lures.” —Stanford Magazine
“Building off of her brilliant 2021 essay for The Believer [, Vara] elegantly grapples with questions around artificial intelligence, technological progress, and human connection.” —The Millions
“A masterful memoir written with the precision of a journalist and skills of a creative writer—both of which Vara is—and framed as a conversation with ChatGPT, Searches . . . takes us on an astonishing journey that shocks us from time to time with how little we know about tech, how much tech knows about us, and how much more there is for all of us to know and learn.”—PEN, “The PEN Ten”
“Timely and necessary. . . . Ultimately, this book asks us to engage in the big questions and to ask what makes us human and if we are letting machines and capitalism engulf our humanity.”—International Examiner
“[Vara] invites us to pause and reflect on the agency we still possess in these the late stages of global capitalism, and to imagine alternative, hopeful futures. . . . While her background as a top-tier tech journalist gives the book an air of authority, Vara’s skills as a novelist (The Immortal King Rao, a 2023 Pulitzer finalist) are what bring Searches to life.”—Rocky Mountain Reader
“The most exhilarating, whimsical, and insightful book I’ve read this year. . . . Propulsive and unexpected.”—Anne Helen Petersen, Culture Study
“Provocative. . . . Vara examines the allure and risks of AI-powered communication — questioning whether these tools will liberate us or further exploit our voices.”—Denizen
“Readers will be profoundly moved by this remarkable meditation.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Tragic, funny, and relatable[, Searches] is by turns absurd and insightful, engaging with the ethics of algorithms, surveillance, and privacy in a meaningful way. . . . A must read.”—Library Journal, starred review
“Vara’s essays are beautifully written and profoundly researched, but what sets them apart is their profound vulnerability. Her use of experimental forms . . . pushes the limits of the genre without ever compromising her circumspective, confessional approach. An original essay collection about loss, technology, morality, and identity.”—Kirkus, starred review
“Vara humanizes the influence of technology in highly personal terms [and] projects what the future holds as tech oligarchs gain political influence. . . . Provocative, challenging, and concerning, Vara’s clever, eye-opening approach brings home the often uneasy confluence of individual desire, social benefits, and corporate ambition.” —Booklist, starred review
“A book of essays in the original sense, which is to say that it is a book of experiments, of interrogations: of the internet, of form, of possibilities, of ourselves.”—LitHub, “Most Anticipated Books of 2025”
“Searches is that rare thing: a genuinely thrilling book that breaks open existing forms and structures to offer something entirely new. Vara brings the rigor of a reporter and the exhilarating impulses of an artist into this extraordinary, sui generis book: with wit, insight, tenderness, humility, and clear-eyed candor, she explores the wild frontiers of what our lives have already become. The stakes are high. The ride is terrifying and illuminating at once. This book will leave you changed and stay with you for good.”—Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story
“I cannot imagine a better guide through the infuriating, labyrinthine underworld of technology than Vauhini Vara. Searches is so many things—heart-stoppingly sad, a formal high-wire act, a wise and funny and thoughtful encyclopedia of our modern age—but most of all it is a book about human relationships: how imperfectly we made this thing that connects us, and how we might use this thing to re-meet ourselves and each other.”— Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House
“What an original, expansive, epic achievement. I’ve been waiting for a follow-up to Vauhini Vara’s magazine piece ‘Ghosts,’ where she introduced us to a new machine-based technology — a predecessor to ChatGPT — that had the potential to replace writers like herself. What she’s delivered in Searches is a riveting, provocative and deeply personal exploration of our ambivalent relationship with technology that spans from our earliest history to the advent of the internet to the race to dominate artificial intelligence. This is a book that will challenge your notions of what it means to be human, investigating our quest for connection and understanding of our place in the world when technology is getting devilishly good at mimicking us. There is no one better to tell this story than Vauhini Vara, with her deeply engaging personal narratives, infused with curiosity and humor, who has grown up with the internet and sat in the front row as the captains of Big Tech brought us the technologies that now permeate our lives. This book doesn’t lead you to a simple and automatic conclusion. In perhaps the most human of qualities, it will make you continue to question, to search.”— Cecilia Kang, co-author of An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination and award-winning New York Times technology and policy reporter
“Searches picks up where Vauhini Vara’s impressive first novel, The Immortal King Rao, left off; this new book deepens, complicates, and amplifies her ongoing investigation into the nature of artificial intelligence, especially in relationship to the human body, mortality, sorrow, and grief. Blessedly free of cant or posture and extremely knowledgeable about (and acutely conscious of its complicity in) the networks it’s mapping, Searches is Vara’s best and most compelling book yet.”—David Shields, author of Reality Hunger
“In Searches, the novelist Vauhini Vara gives us a thought-provoking exploration of our age of digital networks and AI. A seemingly omnipresent observer of this revolution, she takes us on a journey from middle-school chat rooms in 1990s Oklahoma, to an early, pre-OpenAI interview with Sam Altman, to her wary interactions with the then-new, not-yet-public AI model GPT-3 as she seeks to make sense of a youthful trauma that won’t go away. Searches defies simple, familiar narrative at every turn, rendering a compelling warning of how our technology both connects and commodifies us, molding our understanding of our world and ourselves.”—David A. Price, author of Geniuses at War and The Pixar Touch
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