Ellen Ullman is a novelist, critic and computer programmer so well known for her incisive, highly personal writing on technology that when her latest novel “By Blood“ appeared, even the New York Times was surprised to discover that it’s set long before the Web, in Zodiac Killer–era San Francisco, and doesn’t involve computers at all. The narrator, a disgraced professor — “the spawn of Kafka and Krafft-Ebing, squirrelly and vaguely deviant,” as Parul Sehgal has said — rents an office in a building straight out of an Edgar Allan Poe story and soon becomes obsessed with the woman whose therapy sessions he hears through the wall.
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