Bookends with Mattea Roach A fictional ad agency — and its very real ghosts
Nov 12, 2025
27:40
In Aurora Stewart de Peña's debut novel, Julius Julius, ads are inescapable … which isn’t far off from real life. If you ever feel unsettled by the way that marketing influences us, you’ll probably resonate with Julius Julius. It's a satirical look at the advertising industry and a finalist for this year’s Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. Aurora herself is a veteran of the advertising world, so her novel is an insider's point of view through an inventive fictional gaze. This week, Aurora joins Mattea to talk about her own career, finding the absurd in advertising and what blonde sausage dogs have to do with it all.
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