Back Draft: Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman
Ava, the grief-stricken protagonist of Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman’s novel The Very Nice Box, is an engineer at STÄDA — a kind of Ikea/Muji hybrid that produces everything from forks and spoons to couches. She’s determined to bury herself in work, until a disarming, perhaps suspiciously eager young guy named Mat Putnam joins the company and throws Ava’s carefully ordered world into upheaval.
The Very Nice Box is a story of love, trauma, deception, and minimalist design. And while Blackett and Gleichman initially set out to write a suspense novel, the book is a satisfying mix of genres and tones. A queer Brooklyn office novel that winks knowingly at its cultural milieu, the book ratchets up tension through romance and satire to deliver twists that feel shocking — and then, gratifyingly, inevitable.
Despite its main character’s isolation, it’s also a story of friendship, and the product of one. Gleichman, a short story writer with an MFA, and Blackett, a hobbyist woodworker with a day job in tech, brought different styles and strengths to their collaboration. To write and revise the book, they had to be flexible and renounce ownership of particular ideas, a process that benefited from what Blackett calls their “compatible egos.” As they describe it, the experience of writing was one of pleasurable problem solving, not unlike the feeling Ava gets from working on her own design projects. The first book for both writers, Blackett and Gleichman are already
