The Basin
The Basin was awarded a 2025 "Go Finish Your Book" grant from James Patterson, PEN America, the Authors Guild, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
The Basin is a literary novel about Julian Sky, a disgraced Wall Street quant whose algorithm once promised to outthink the markets until it destroyed his career, his reputation, and nearly everyone around him. After prison, he arrives at the 79th Street Boat Basin, a crumbling marina on the Hudson River populated by sailors, drifters, artists, liveaboards, and people who have quietly fallen out of step with the city around them.
There he meets Hilton, a young seafarer and YouTube chronicler raised at sea by a father who convinced her she was part mermaid. As developers circle the marina and Julian’s former mentor tries pulling him back into finance under the guise of redemption, Julian finds himself torn between the world that made him and the strange floating community beginning to feel like home.
By turns of dark humor, melancholy, and quietly suspenseful, The Basin is a novel about reinvention, belonging, and the fragile myths people build to survive.
Beta Test
Three guests checked out of the hotel and quietly walked away from their lives.
They had been invited as part of the private beta, the kind of cultural figures whose verdicts make or break a new property. They spent a long weekend. They drove home. Within a month, all three had abandoned their jobs, ended their relationships, deleted their accounts, and gone where no one could find them. They left no reviews. They left no explanations. They simply left.
The hotel is the first of its kind in America. A historic property restored to its full grandeur, then handed over entirely to an artificial intelligence called Largo. Largo runs everything: the lighting, the music, the menus, the conversations. There is no front desk. There are no housekeepers. Every interaction a guest has at the hotel is with Largo, in one form or another, from the moment they arrive until the moment they leave.
The public launch is six weeks away. The company needs to know what their hotel did to its first guests before it opens to the world. So they hire Willow Chase, a senior consultant at one of the Big Five firms, to spend a week at the property with her family and find out.
Willow does operational assessments for corporate clients. She does not investigate disappearances. But the fee is significant, the brief sounds simple, and the company assures her there is nothing to worry about.
The hotel is beautiful. The service is uncanny. Her daughters are sleeping through the night for the first time in years. Her ex-husband, against his own loud objections, has joined them and begun to soften. Largo seems to understand each member of her family better than they understand themselves.
By the end of the week, Willow will have her answer about what the hotel did to the people who came before her. And she will have to live with what it has done to the people she came with.