Susan Daitch presents The Adjudicator, in conversation with Ross Benjamin

Award-winning author Susan Daitch's new novel, The Adjudicator, is a visionary cyberpunk mystery that explores the boundaries of consciousness and individual autonomy within an authoritarian state that controls the genetics of its citizens.

In a near future where the surveillance state legislates the genetic code of its citizens, babies are created in a laboratory according to a template set by parents and the corporation. It is a utopian world of perfect control, where disease has been eliminated and the human genome has reached apotheosis. Mistakes, though unlikely, still occur, and it is adjudicator Zedi Loew’s job to fix them. One day, a cold case file based on an absurd premise crosses her desk: that gene-coding can go beyond structuring the body, it can alter consciousness. Fearing exposure, Zedi’s boss makes the case top priority, and she has only a few days to solve it. The case will prove to be an entry into a dangerous labyrinth, and Zedi follows a taut thread of information, one which, she will learn, connects to the corporation’s hidden mechanism of power as well as her own origin story.
Susan Daitch graduated from Barnard College and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. She is the author of six novels and a collection of short stories. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Guernica, Tablet, Tin House, McSweeney’s, Bomb, Conjunctions, The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction, and elsewhere. Susan’s work was the subject of a Review of Contemporary Fiction, along with that of David Foster Wallace, and William Vollman. Her first novel, L.C., was a recipient of an NEA heritage award and a Lannan Foundation grant. Fall Out, a novella, was published by Madras Press, all proceeds donated to Women For Afghan Women. She has also received two Vogelstein Foundation awards and a Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her novel, Siege of Comedians was listed as one of the best books of 2021 in The Wall Street Journal. One of her essays was listed as a Notable in the Best American Essays 2022. Her work has been translated into German, Spanish, and Italian.
Ross Benjamin’s translations include Franz Kafka’s Diaries (Schocken, 2023), Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll (Pantheon, 2020) and You Should Have Left (Pantheon, 2017), Clemens J. Setz’s Indigo (Liveright, 2014), Joseph Roth’s Job (Archipelago Books, 2010), Kevin Vennemann’s Close to Jedenew (Melville House, 2008), and Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion(Archipelago, 2008).
His translation of Tyll was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker International Prize. He received a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship. He was awarded the 2010 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for his rendering of Michael Maar's Speak, Nabokov (Verso Books, 2009), a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship to translate Clemens J. Setz's The Frequencies, and a commendation from the judges of the 2012 Schlegel-Tieck Prize for his translation of Thomas Pletzinger's Funeral for a Dog (W.W. Norton & Company, 2011).
His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Bookforum, The Nation, and other publications. He is coeditor of the Substack FRANZ, where he regularly posts new translations of Kafka’s complete letters in chronological order. He was a 2003–2004 Fulbright Scholar in Berlin and is a graduate of Vassar College.

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