The Computer Room

By: Emma Ensley

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Paperback | 4 September 2025

At a Glance

Paperback
134 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
20.32 x 12.7 x 0.91

Paperback

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In this unforgettable debut, Emma Ensley cracks open a time capsule of adolescence and young adulthood at the turn of the millennium, when internet chatrooms and youth group missions collided, when fanfiction forums pulsed with drama, and when girls learned to code-switch between AOL screen names and church pews. These linked stories hum with the strange holiness of coming-of-age: babysitting jobs and Bible verses, slap bracelets and slut-shaming, cheerleading chants and Cabbage Patch births. Told with tenderness and precision, The Computer Room captures what it means to grow up longing-for closeness, for clarity, for someone to tell you what to name the baby. Ensley's characters are forever on the cusp of first love, of self-invention, of figuring out how to live in the body and in the South.

Through 13 stories, Ensley brings to life the joys, fears, and complexities of adolescence and early adulthood-where first loves, friendships, and the search for identity collide with messy bedrooms, teenage rebellion, and the quiet hum of the family computer. Ensley's sharp, heartfelt writing makes you laugh, reflect, and feel connected to those fleeting moments of youth when everything seemed both endlessly possible and impossibly confusing.

Industry Reviews

These thirteen short stories have made me more homesick than I've been in years. For Bojangles, old babysitting gigs, and weekend drives with my very own red-headed crush on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Ensley's debut is self-assured; a sudden squall of warm air blowing open the screen-door of a brief and bygone southern adolescence. With dual perfect attention to the Carolina landscape and Tumblr 90s nostalgia, The Computer Room puts forward a glittering mosaic portrait of small-town girlhood. With a weird and tender imagination on full display, Ensley emerges right on time. The ease of her storytelling is exuberant.

Grace Ezra, Editor-in-Chief of Hood of Bone Review

In these stories, I get to hang out in the glow of being young in the South at the dawn of being online, an experience deep in my bones that these stories shake back to the surface. Reading The Computer Room, I feel like anything could happen, which is magical, because it might be sweet, or it might be devastating, or it might be messier and more beautiful than anything I could ever imagine, and I won't know until my screen lights up, or the sky from the parking lot at Sonic fills up with stars. I'm obsessed.

Caroline Rayner, author of THE MOAN WILDS

Laughing my ass off, and shedding a tear at this teenage fever dream. The Computer Room is a vivid recollection of the most haunting period of my life.

Lorg, musician (SALES, Lorg)

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