Cover image of "The Computer Room" book by Loblolly Press, featuring a modern, artistic design with computer-themed artwork.
Interior view of a cozy computer room with a desk, computer, and shelves, designed by Loblolly Press.
Interior view of "The Computer Room" by Loblolly Press, showcasing a cozy space with vintage computer equipment and shelves.

The Computer Room

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The Computer Room, Emma Ensley's stunning debut collection of short stories, captures messy, heartfelt, and often surreal moments of coming of age in small-town America in the early days of the internet. 
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Learn about the author and the book

In this unforgettable debut, Emma Ensley cracks open a time capsule of adolescence at the turn of the millennium, when internet chatrooms and youth group missions collided, when fanfiction forums pulsed with drama, and when girls learned to code-switch between AOL screen names and church pews. These linked stories hum with the strange holiness of coming-of-age: babysitting jobs and Bible verses, slap bracelets and slut-shaming, cheerleading chants and Cabbage Patch births. Told with tenderness and precision, The Computer Room captures what it means to grow up longing—for closeness, for clarity, for someone to tell you what to name the baby. Ensley’s characters are forever on the cusp of first love, of self-invention, of figuring out how to live in the body and in the South.

Through 13 stories, Ensley brings to life the joys, fears, and complexities of adolescence and early adulthood—where first loves, friendships, and the search for identity collide with messy bedrooms, teenage rebellion, and the quiet hum of the family computer. Ensley’s sharp, heartfelt writing makes you laugh, reflect, and feel connected to those fleeting moments of youth when everything seemed both endlessly possible and impossibly confusing.

Emma Ensley is a fiction writer, artist, and graphic designer living in Asheville, North Carolina. She grew up in North Georgia and on the internet, and considers both places equally influential to her work. Her short fiction has appeared in Joyland, The Quarterless Review, and Peach Mag.

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Praise

The Computer Room oozes ambient warmth laced with humor and pricked with delightful bursts of weirdness. From the punk show to the recovery blog to tradwife TikTok to the dive bar, Ensley delicately excavates the digital and deeply human ties that bind us.
— Aiden Arata, author of You Have a New Memory
With dual attention to the Carolina landscape and '90s nostalgia, The Computer Room puts forward a glittering mosaic portrait of small-town girlhood. Ensley's debut is self-assured—a sudden squall of warm air blowing open the screen door of a brief and bygone Southern adolescence. The ease of her storytelling is exuberant.
— Grace Ezra, Editor-in-Chief of Hood of Bone Review
I get to hang out in the glow of being young in the South at the dawn of being online—drinking a Slurpee waiting for The Sims to load, a Miller High Life at the dive bar with a jukebox full of Modest Mouse. These stories are full of texture and big feelings that stick, quietly but definitively, to everything, like humidity. I'm obsessed.
— Caroline Rayner, author of The Moan Wilds
Laughing my ass off, and shedding a tear at this teenage fever dream. The Computer Room is a vivid recollection of the most haunting period of my life.
— Lorg, musician (SALES)

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