Peter Mendelsund

Enter the world of the Delivery Boy, who must peddle his way to 5-star customer ratings—and, perhaps, freedom—in novelist and graphic designer Peter Mendelsund’s The Delivery. Countries go wrong, sometimes, and sometimes the luckier citizens of those countries have a chance to escape and seek refuge in another country—a country that might itself be in the process of going wrong. In the bustling indifference of an unnamed city, one such citizen finds himself trapped working for a company that makes its money dispatching an army of undocumented refugees to bring the well-off men and women of this confounding metropolis their dinners. Whatever he might have been at home, this citizen is now a Delivery Boy: member of a new and invisible working class, pedaling his power-assist bike through traffic hoping for a decent tip and a five star rating. He is decidedly a Delivery Boy; sometimes he even feels like a Delivery Baby; certainly he's not yet a Delivery Man, though he'll have to "man-up" if he wants to impress N.—the aloof dispatcher who sends him his orders and helps him with his English. Can our hero avoid the wrath of his Supervisor, get the girl, and escape his indentured servitude? Can someone in his predicament ever get a happy ending? Who gets to decide? And who's telling this story, anyway? Harrowing and hilarious, The Delivery is a fable for and about our times: an exploration of the ways language and commerce unites and isolates every one of us, native and immigrant both.

A Novel

The Delivery

shivani karadia

What I intend to say is that there were important features of my life that, on occasion, superseded much of the suffering, notably, my upswelling adolescence, which was just beginning to exert itself then—a budding manhood that needed just such an upheaval as its proper context…

Hardship, then, became the correct milieu for my having become romantically entangled, for instance, and after this, everything was from then on played out on from of an operatic back cloth; painted scenery backing a storybook drama. In just this way, we became the principal players in this theatre—the girl with the red hair, who was my first heroine; and the fact of my having one then made all my other losses bearable.

And he put his feet back down on the pedals and began once again to work, though it felt as natural as breathing and he followed the road and therefore the river followed it out and away from the city and the tight ambit of his previously bonded life, and he could see, following its lines and currents, that as if via some application of narrative magic, the estuary had reversed its flow, now following him upriver and away, and he recognised then, as I do, a capacity for moving forward, an ability to go on endlessly of necessary, on and on, and though he did not yet know what he was moving toward he knew then that a happy life was a headlong life and a fluent life and that whatever was to befall him at the end, he would be able to say, finally, that he was conversant,

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