The Summer People is the Perfect Story for the Age of Amazon-style Worker Exploitation
4 min readApr 19, 2021
Though it was about five years before the pandemic, Kelly Link’s highly acclaimed short story The Summer People bears an uncomfortable resemblance to working conditions of essential workers. In fact, the story could just as easily be called “Alice in Wonderland for Essential Workers” and it would make complete sense.
In an effort to avoid spoilers, I’ll comment on this fantastic work of capitalist critique in vague terms. The first in a series of short stories featured in her book Get…
