Benjamin Kessler is the author of the novella The Pinnacle, forthcoming from Buckman Publishing (March, 2025). He is also the author of the short story collection Of This World (Game Over Books, 2023), which included fiction The Gravity of the Thing featured in our Winter 2019 issue and Stranged Writing anthology.
About The Pinnacle:
The Pinnacle is a slim but telling volume. An unnamed narrator who works in the tallest building in the world, the eponymous Pinnacle, finds himself delving deeper into the building’s nexus and reckoning with his own in the process. A damning but highly entertaining tale of extreme capitalism, The Pinnacle presents a version of a future we’re easily hurtling towards—a future in which self-surveillance and superstructures flourish: the Hawaiian islands are linked by record-breaking bridges, healthcare is discounted for using your employer’s branded social media app, and The Pinnacle towers at 324 floors and counting. Proprietary technology in the form of a massive rod rammed into the planet’s core allows The Pinnacle to keep growing indefinitely, and along with it, the secrecy that surrounds its Manhattan address. Equal parts prophetic and psychedelic, funny and foreboding, this story about labor and how our jobs define us (or don’t) ultimately becomes one about honesty, family, and self-actualization.
Advance praise:
“Benjamin Kessler’s page-turning, dystopian-skyscraper novella is both appropriately psychedelic and surprisingly emotionally vulnerable. The imagery and unique dreamstate of The Pinnacle will linger with you long after you finish.”
—Joshua James Amberson, author of Staring Contest and How to Forget Almost Everything
“Benjamin Kessler’s The Pinnacle is the most unsettling type of dystopia: one that is just a few degrees off from our present reality. This slim novella captures the dehumanization of American workers in late-stage capitalism in a way that is not only smart and entertaining, but gorgeously written and laugh-out-loud funny.”
—Gabriel Urza, author of The White Death: An Illusion and All That Followed
“Like the building at the center of this destabilizing and wonderfully odd tale, The Pinnacle is massive in scope and yet strangely tidy in its construction. In less confident hands this book might have turned into a five hundred page doorstop. Bravo to Benjamin Kessler for bringing to life one of the most beguiling narrators I’ve encountered recently. Lyrical, curious, self-sabotaging—it’s his harrowing display of humanity that sets The Pinnacle in a class of its own.”
—Michael Heald, author of Goodbye to the Nervous Apprehension