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The Ginny Suite
SALT. MagazineRadioGrantNewsAboutCloseStacy Skolnik – The Ginny Suite
'Information didn’t need to be remembered; it remembered her…'
A mysterious global syndrome is affecting women, causing symptoms of submissiveness and aphasia. While the number of sufferers grows, so does our protagonist’s paranoia—of the media, her doctors, and her husband. In the age of misinformation, AI, and surveillance technology, The Ginny Suite asks how much—and who—we’re willing to sacrifice in the name of progress.
The Ginny Suite is formally innovative, a great read. Stacy Skolnik recasts the subject of the internet into telling particulars in her affecting choreography of memes/screens/women/men.
— Constance DeJong, author of Modern Love
The Ginny Suite is a perfect hell of a book: a gossipy stylish mystery that’s both petty and profound. I love how its paranoias and insecurities tip lushly into plot: is the lyric condition of poetry a pathology? Is dissociation a radical response to the lived conditions of patriarchy, or is it patriarchy hacking your brain into submission? What if, instead of self-diagnosing through google, your search history was used to diagnose you, and form the basis of covert treatment? Anyone who’s ever suffered the malady of writing poems will recognise The Ginny Suite’s inability to stop picking these scabs. Its prose moves seamlessly from the lush to the blunt, awash with glitching pronouns, horny ennui, sci-fi intrigue and tender girlish digital fantasies—like if the author of Malina had a dormant Neopets account. I adored it.
— Daisy Lafarge, author of Lovebug
Perversely brilliant, fearlessly inventive, The Ginny Suite beautifully illustrates the horror of being a thinking person inside of a body and culture rushing toward the graveyard.
— Brad Phillips, author of Essays and Fictions
The Ginny Suite proves that Stacy Skolnik is one of the most timely and original voices in post-pandemic New York.
— Joshua Citarella, author of Politigram and the Post-left
A Handmaid’s Tale for the Post-Truth-AI-Surveillance Era.
— Suzanne Treister, author of Hexen 2.0
'Information didn’t need to be remembered; it remembered her…'
A mysterious global syndrome is affecting women, causing symptoms of submissiveness and aphasia. While the number of sufferers grows, so does our protagonist’s paranoia—of the media, her doctors, and her husband. In the age of misinformation, AI, and surveillance technology, The Ginny Suite asks how much—and who—we’re willing to sacrifice in the name of progress.
The Ginny Suite is formally innovative, a great read. Stacy Skolnik recasts the subject of the internet into telling particulars in her affecting choreography of memes/screens/women/men.
— Constance DeJong, author of Modern Love
The Ginny Suite is a perfect hell of a book: a gossipy stylish mystery that’s both petty and profound. I love how its paranoias and insecurities tip lushly into plot: is the lyric condition of poetry a pathology? Is dissociation a radical response to the lived conditions of patriarchy, or is it patriarchy hacking your brain into submission? What if, instead of self-diagnosing through google, your search history was used to diagnose you, and form the basis of covert treatment? Anyone who’s ever suffered the malady of writing poems will recognise The Ginny Suite’s inability to stop picking these scabs. Its prose moves seamlessly from the lush to the blunt, awash with glitching pronouns, horny ennui, sci-fi intrigue and tender girlish digital fantasies—like if the author of Malina had a dormant Neopets account. I adored it.
— Daisy Lafarge, author of Lovebug
Perversely brilliant, fearlessly inventive, The Ginny Suite beautifully illustrates the horror of being a thinking person inside of a body and culture rushing toward the graveyard.
— Brad Phillips, author of Essays and Fictions
The Ginny Suite proves that Stacy Skolnik is one of the most timely and original voices in post-pandemic New York.
— Joshua Citarella, author of Politigram and the Post-left
A Handmaid’s Tale for the Post-Truth-AI-Surveillance Era.
— Suzanne Treister, author of Hexen 2.0
- GenresFiction
145 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 2024
3 people are currently reading
166 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
October 14, 2024
Conspiracy analysts, bio-activists,and others such as controversial cultural theorist Alex Hamberdon [...] point to the uncanny overlap between behavior exhibited by the PerfectCompanion® gynoid from FakSimile and other recent AI models, and those with advanced cases of Sunnyvale syndrome.
The Ginny Suite is the first novel by The Montez Press Radio co-founder Stacy Skolnik.
The first page, in the style of a newspaper article (rather odd fashioned, although the novel is set in the near future) sets the scene:
The article goes on to explain more on Sunnyvale syndrome, which only impacts women:
Although the ages of patients have ranged from 12 to 66 years, most have been under 40. In addition to typical indications of dissociative identity disorder such as amnesia and “out-of-body” experiences, many of the patients are also exhibiting symptoms such as narcolepsy and a condition known as illeism, in which speakers refer to themselves in the third person. What victims say begins as aphasia, nausea, and intense fatigue is often later accompanied by symptoms associated with catatonia, such as waxy flexibility and decreased sensitivity to pain.
According to Bevan, the reporting doctors said that most cases have involved heterosexual women who have undergone surgery for other medical conditions within the past year and a half.
The story alternates between archival material, including clinical reports; the story of Ginny, one of those who has succumbed to Sunnyvale syndrome; and the first person narrator, a married poet who writes her work on her phone in the loos of bars where she has hooked up with various men, simulteously attracted and repulsed by what she does and the world around her.
From interviews (see below) there is an autofictional link in the poems to Skolnik's own work, plus various details ("the more times it’s read, the more secrets pop out and the more little details become revealed") that made me wonder how much I missed.
But as one example, and to give a flavour for the material covered, the afterword of the novel, a PATHOLOGY REPORT, consists of 575 URLs, on which the author has commented in an interview in Bomb Magazine:
I read an e-copy of the book so was able to click through to the links (although as Skolnik comments, some were already defunct by the time the book was published, itself a comment on the inpermanence of the digital world), and taking just a sub-sample of a sub-sample, 13 of the 43 of those link to Youtube, I was led to the following:
- the movie Gaslight;
- a newsclip on the migration of millions of butterflies;
- two AI chatbots talking to each other;
- archive footage of exotic dancers;
- a infovideo on the future of genetic Engineering;
- Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault debating the nature of power in 1971;
- a clip from Karloff's Frankenstein;
- Desmond Morris, from The Human Animal, talking about body language;
- the TV movie The Face On The Milk Carton, about a 16yo girl who realises she has been kidnapped;
- a video about government experiments testing the effects of LSD;
- a review of a sex doll;
- an introduction to Affect Theory; and
- footage of Elvis in Las Vegas singing Suspicious Minds.
A novel that I suspect would reward closer, and better informed, reading, but 3 stars for my experience.
Further interviews
https://www.documentjournal.com/2024/...
https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles...
The press
Envisaged as the third iteration of the spirit of Lola Montez (Lola, Maria, Mario), Montez Press was formed in 2012. We have since commissioned and published experimental work by artists, writers and thinkers with a focus on queer and intersectional feminist practices through the lens of artists’ writing. We are committed to curiosity, questioning established methods and systems, and engaging in open conversation and dialogue. Our methods are deeply collaborative. We seek to support unexpected creators, including those who may not receive institutional support due to social and economic systemic prejudices. We commit to a rigorous editorial process in our effort to produce work that takes risks and surprises and challenges the reader.
The Ginny Suite is the first novel by The Montez Press Radio co-founder Stacy Skolnik.
The first page, in the style of a newspaper article (rather odd fashioned, although the novel is set in the near future) sets the scene:
The article goes on to explain more on Sunnyvale syndrome, which only impacts women:
Although the ages of patients have ranged from 12 to 66 years, most have been under 40. In addition to typical indications of dissociative identity disorder such as amnesia and “out-of-body” experiences, many of the patients are also exhibiting symptoms such as narcolepsy and a condition known as illeism, in which speakers refer to themselves in the third person. What victims say begins as aphasia, nausea, and intense fatigue is often later accompanied by symptoms associated with catatonia, such as waxy flexibility and decreased sensitivity to pain.
According to Bevan, the reporting doctors said that most cases have involved heterosexual women who have undergone surgery for other medical conditions within the past year and a half.
The story alternates between archival material, including clinical reports; the story of Ginny, one of those who has succumbed to Sunnyvale syndrome; and the first person narrator, a married poet who writes her work on her phone in the loos of bars where she has hooked up with various men, simulteously attracted and repulsed by what she does and the world around her.
From interviews (see below) there is an autofictional link in the poems to Skolnik's own work, plus various details ("the more times it’s read, the more secrets pop out and the more little details become revealed") that made me wonder how much I missed.
But as one example, and to give a flavour for the material covered, the afterword of the novel, a PATHOLOGY REPORT, consists of 575 URLs, on which the author has commented in an interview in Bomb Magazine:
It can be read in various ways: as the author, either myself as the author of The Ginny Suite or the protagonist-as-author in the metafictional reading of the book, citing her sources; or as another clinical report. It mirrors the format of the medical reports earlier on in the book: a diagnostic tool for the doctor’s examining her. What if you were able to use someone’s search history as a way to diagnose or pathologize them?
I read an e-copy of the book so was able to click through to the links (although as Skolnik comments, some were already defunct by the time the book was published, itself a comment on the inpermanence of the digital world), and taking just a sub-sample of a sub-sample, 13 of the 43 of those link to Youtube, I was led to the following:
- the movie Gaslight;
- a newsclip on the migration of millions of butterflies;
- two AI chatbots talking to each other;
- archive footage of exotic dancers;
- a infovideo on the future of genetic Engineering;
- Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault debating the nature of power in 1971;
- a clip from Karloff's Frankenstein;
- Desmond Morris, from The Human Animal, talking about body language;
- the TV movie The Face On The Milk Carton, about a 16yo girl who realises she has been kidnapped;
- a video about government experiments testing the effects of LSD;
- a review of a sex doll;
- an introduction to Affect Theory; and
- footage of Elvis in Las Vegas singing Suspicious Minds.
A novel that I suspect would reward closer, and better informed, reading, but 3 stars for my experience.
Further interviews
https://www.documentjournal.com/2024/...
https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles...
The press
Envisaged as the third iteration of the spirit of Lola Montez (Lola, Maria, Mario), Montez Press was formed in 2012. We have since commissioned and published experimental work by artists, writers and thinkers with a focus on queer and intersectional feminist practices through the lens of artists’ writing. We are committed to curiosity, questioning established methods and systems, and engaging in open conversation and dialogue. Our methods are deeply collaborative. We seek to support unexpected creators, including those who may not receive institutional support due to social and economic systemic prejudices. We commit to a rigorous editorial process in our effort to produce work that takes risks and surprises and challenges the reader.
July 22, 2024
While the prose tended to get slippery, my eyes glazing over the text, it did ask pertinent questions about the revolt of the body under the surveillance capitalism, society of control, or whatever we want to call this calamity that is upon us.
September 4, 2025
I liked what it was aiming for and the bits of different in-world media strewn throughout but it didn’t quite hit for me; I almost felt like it was finally getting going when it ended. It does seem like a book which would benefit from a second reading with hindsight of the first but simultaneously I don’t feel inclined to actually do so due to not really clicking with the author’s writing personally.
May 14, 2025
i read this because a friend liked the cover and gave it to me for my birthday. it was… not good. you can feel the influence of severance (ling ma, not the show) but it’s boring. the part i liked best was the search history, which originally i was going to skip.
August 3, 2024
the book shines inside and out
August 16, 2024
Stacy’s writing moves fluidly and smartly in this eerie novel. I love her inclusion of various forms and ephemera.
March 4, 2025
really wanted to love this as the concept is so amazing- but it just fell a little flat for me :/
March 7, 2025
Very of the times and experimental. I really wanted to like this more but it felt a bit too fragmented - not a smooth read.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews