Michael Lewis

The New New Thing

Press Release

"[R]ip-roaring . . . .Michael Lewis, the petulant sprite whose Liar's Poker hilariously exposed the venalities of Wall Street investment bankers, vies for Tom Wolfe's ice cream suit with an effortlessly glib account . . . . Funny, feverishly romantic . . . the American lust for wealth becomes a Byronic quest for the next dream that will change the world."

— Starred Kirkus Review

On October 25, 1999 W.W. Norton & Company will publish Michael Lewis's THE NEW NEW THING: A Silicon Valley Story. Lewis, whose acclaimed Liar's Poker captured Wall Street culture and became a signature book of the 1980s, here offers a brilliantly observed and hilarious account of how in the 1990s, the power and money moved to the wild wild West.

Welcome to Silicon Valley. Call it what you will—ground zero of the economic boom, capital of the global village, heart of the digital gold rush—it's all that and more. THE NEW NEW THING is a wild safari into the new frontier where twentysomething programmers become millionaires every day, where dot.com-businesses with no product and no profits are hot investments, where all the rules went out the window once the nerds got in charge, and where there's always something newer than new on the horizon.

Lewis's foray into the Internet jungle becomes a rollicking adventure story as he tracks the man who most personifies the world to come. He is Jim Clark, the only person to have created three separate billion-dollar companies, the first of which, Silicon Graphics, revolutionized computer animation while the second, Netscape, triggered the Internet explosion. Unfortunately, the way Clark does his best thinking about what the new new thing is going to be is by taking over the controls of a helicopter he doesn't know how to fly or building the world's largest single-masted yacht and trying to sail it by computer. Before he knows it, Lewis finds himself in the middle of the Atlantic aboard Hyperion, at the mercy of a computer with an unnerving habit of flashing "danger danger danger" for no discernible reason. All he can do is pray that the guy with the mouse knows what he's doing.

From makeshift cubicles where caffeinated programmers work 24 hours a day to the courtroom where Microsoft fights for its right to put others out of business, THE NEW NEW THING ricochets with the energy, optimism, cut-throat competition, and occasional desperation that drive the Valley. We meet an Indian engineer who figures out how to change the American health care system because he is told he has to, a venture capitalist who kills himself after being shut out of a business, a sea captain who hates computers but loves kamikaze investing, and scores of others. All on the road to Healtheon, Clark's third billion-dollar company and one of the most successful IPOs in history, and beyond, to his next hot venture.

THE NEW NEW THING reveals how Silicon Valley changed everything—the way business is done, the way success is measured, the way we think in the 1990s and the way we will live in the 21st century. With keen perception and crackling wit Lewis identifies the epic struggles underway to seize the future—between risky start-ups and giant institutions, between engineers with a taste for anarchy and the Serious American Executive financiers trying to manage them—and asks whether all this innovation, all this money, all this success, is the American Dream come true, or a mirage about to vanish.

Critics have hailed Lewis's writing as "hilarious" (Time, Forbes, The New York Times), "wry, wicked" (Newsweek) and Liar's Poker as "one of those rare works that encapsulate and define an era" (Fortune). Smart, provocative, and thoroughly entertaining, THE NEW NEW THING is Michael Lewis at his best.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michael Lewis is the author of several books, including the international bestseller Liar's Poker. He is a contributing editor of The New York Times Magazine, a columnist for Bloomberg News, and a fellow at the University of California-Berkeley. He lives in Berkeley with his wife, Tabitha Soren, and their newborn daughter.