Tower

Really enjoyed this. A sharp political satire, in the form of a series of interconnected stories set in Beanstalk, a 674-story skyscraper and sovereign nation. It mostly concerns itself with matters of (visible and invisible) power, mass media and information and hype, but is both touching (the elephant Buddha story) and funny (the dog as important power broker) as well as smart.

And the Appendix is fantastic: consisting of the full length versions of some of the stories and pieces of writing that were mentioned in the plot of a number of the stories in the “main” part of the book.