In “Notifications,” Lincoln Michel looks closely at how a person's day can be awkwardly reconfigured by an algorithm. Michel's stories frequently adjust the knobs of the present and settle in the uncanny valley, like Saunders's, or amplify a feeling that something is fundamentally off with our timeline. Here, Michel explores the emotional implications of technology, a sort of hard sci-fi realism that drops the reader into a plausible hologram of workplace interaction. The always overthought, dreamlike logic is not dissimilar to the way a Kafka story, like “The Judgment,” operates. Kafkaesque indecision, but now with cell phones!