Meet Author Asks, the conversation card game that transforms real questions from books into absorbing conversations.

Letter from the Editor

For the past few years, a lot of my work at Author & Co. has meant reading with very specific goals in mind, locating the strange and unexpected places literature enters daily life.

For Author Clock, I was looking for exact minutes of the day. For Author Forecast, I searched for descriptions of weather.

And lately, I’ve been looking for something new: questions!

Honestly, I thought the task would be easier...

There were days when I found myself searching every question in a book and still not finding one that worked for the game.

Some were too tied to plot. Some needed the whole scene around them. Others were questions only in the grammatical sense: “Hello?” “Would you like tea?” “Where are you going?”

The best questions would need to leave the book and still feel worth answering.

When one worked, I usually knew it right away. It had the exact feeling I was looking for: literary, and a bit irresistible.

The idea for Author Asks came to the team as we were thinking about how literature might enter daily life in a more social way.

Our first two products, Author Clock and Author Forecast, are both, in a way, private experiences.

At home, I pass my Author Clock on my desk and catch a quote at 1:17 p.m., or look at Author Forecast and see the sunny day outside reframed through a passage from literature. I love reflecting on the current moment and my surroundings through literature as the day passes. But, like much of my reading, this is usually a solo activity.

Now, Author Asks brings literature into a conversation. A question is read aloud, and suddenly, the quote has company.

Author Asks includes 200 Question Cards, split into two decks: 100 Classic and 100 Contemporary. Each card includes the question, the author, and the book it came from. You can play with the decks separately or mix them together.

To start the game, a player draws a Question Card and reads it aloud. Everyone takes a turn answering. There are no wrong answers, just opportunities to start a conversation, tell a story, hear someone differently, or get to know a friend on a deeper level.

The game also includes 10 Character Cards, which add a “plot twist” to the round. You might answer as The Poet, The Unreliable Narrator, or another literary persona when the table needs more drama, humor, or a new direction.

One of my favorite elements of the final version is the packaging.

The box looks like a book, so it can sit on a bookshelf with the novels, stories, and authors that inspired it. Inside are the Classic and Contemporary decks, along with the Character Cards and the white oak stand.

Oh, and how could I forget? The white oak stand is an especially nice touch because it has two purposes.

During gameplay, it holds one question upright, elevating the card being played.

And between games, the stand gives the question an opportunity to have another life.

If you’re particularly enchanted by a quote, any Question Card can be displayed on a desk, a coffee table, a nightstand, or a bookshelf, like a sentence you haven’t finished answering yet.

One of my favorite Question Cards is from Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

He asks, “Is it possible, finally, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?”

So, what do you think?

Let’s play a round of Author Asks and find out.

-Yasmin

We’re bringing literature to daily life in wonderfully unexpected ways.

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Yasmin is Head of Content & Community, where she curates the quote libraries for all Author & Co. products. .

At Author & Co., we combine design, function, and our love of reading to create tools that bring literature into your everyday life.

Learn more at authorandco.com

For inquiries about Author Asks, please email us at info@authorandco.com

This work began early in 2025, when we started building Author Forecast, a device that displays your local weather through literary quotes. But my role at Author & Co. goes back further. In 2022, we launched our first product, Author Clock, and I took on the task of curating a library that would grow to over 13,000 time-specific quotes.

Author Clock tells time through literature, and every minute of the day is paired with a line from fiction that references that exact moment (12:00, 4:17, five o’clock in the afternoon). I spent over a year reading, cataloging, and cross-referencing thousands of excerpts, learning how time behaves on the page. I realized that time, when written, is more than a measurement. When time shows up in fiction, it is displayed as shadows, lateness, in the way a mood shifts at a certain hour. “2:30 a.m.,” “two thirty,” “0230 hours”—these are functional. Literature tells time differently.

“It was half‑past two o’clock when the knock came. I took my courage à deux mains and waited.”
— Bram Stoker, Dracula

Here, time becomes a shift in the air, the feeling of something about to happen. Half-past two is late at night, of course, but it’s also the hour when everything changes!

Both projects, Author Clock and Author Forecast, ask the same question: What happens when we let literature mediate the way we move through the day?

Weather, like time, has its scientific vocabulary, but it also has a literary one: poetic, sensory, regional, unpredictable. While creating Author Forecast, we narrowed our search to twenty-seven distinct weather conditions, from Overcast and Partly Cloudy to Sleet and the rare Snow with Thunderstorms. In literature, these conditions become story settings—a forecast of Rain is weighty and dramatic.

“The rain was blowing sideways now, beating against the window like a creature trying to come in.”
— Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

When I really got started on building the Author Forecast quote library, it was winter, a season of grey skies and early dusk. I read for language that could establish the feeling of snow, sleet, and freezing rain. I began to identify the kind of sentence Author Forecast needed: language that emulated the appearance and the texture of weather.

“The snow goes whirling, invisible tattooing needles against the nerveless window glass behind the green shades.”
— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

I could feel the snow, see the glass. I could imagine the scene. And so, the snow kept falling, and I kept reading.

Over time, my daily routines began to reflect my research. As the seasons changed, from my desk, I found myself turning toward the window more often. I watched the light change in the flower beds, tracked the trees behind our house as they moved from bud to bloom to shade.

“Being happy is rather melancholy—like the most beautiful landscape, like those trees and the grass and the clouds and the sunshine to‑day.”
— Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop

When I walked through the woods with my dog, I took the imagery with me. Sometimes it fit the day perfectly, and sometimes it took me somewhere else, to a different scene, even in the same weather. No matter what, though, it made me pay attention.

After work, usually around 5 p.m. (five o’clock, 1700 hours, however you’d like to frame it), I’d drive across the Hudson River to pick up my one‑year‑old son. The drive itself became a kind of sky‑reading in it of itself.

In February, it was still dark when I left the house. The skies shifted between snow and mostly cloudy. In March, the weather turned erratic. Freezing rain fell often, coating everything in a thin layer of ice. It wasn’t a condition I had thought much about before, but now it kept appearing. April gave us low skies and fog, and I could barely see past my windshield.

By May, I began to notice subtler distinctions in cloud cover. I read about them during the day, and I looked for them in the sky on my drive across the bridge. A perfectly clear sky: sunny. If there were just a few clouds behind me but none ahead: mostly sunny. And when the light dappled through scattered clouds: partly sunny. By June, the weather shifted again to brief showers, wide temperature swings, and a sky that often lingered in the realm of overcast. And all the while, I kept driving; I kept noticing.

And the same is true of Author Clock, which has influenced my sense of time for years. It sits on my desk, changing minute by minute, each new quote a view into a different world. Some are familiar, some surprise me, and every now and then, I’ll glance at the clock and see a quote like this one:

“Now it was five o’clock, and although he didn’t have a watch and couldn’t tell time too well yet anyway, he was aware of passing time by the lengthening of the shadows, and by the golden cast that now tinged the afternoon light.”
— Stephen King, The Shining

I recognize both the narrative urgency and my own. It’s time to gather my things, leave the house, and cross the Hudson River. The quote pushes me into motion with language, carrying me from desk to car, from story to sky, into evening, into darkness.

—Yasmin

Yasmin Gruss is Head of Content & Community at Author & Co., where she curates the quote libraries for Author Clock and Author Forecast.

At Author & Co., we combine design, function, and our love of reading to create tools that bring literature into your everyday life.

Learn more at authorandco.com

At Author & Co., we’ve borrowed the term literary devices, and we’ve taken it literally.

Our products, Author Clock and Author Forecast, are designed to be literary and devices at once. They are functional tools that carry the experience of reading into everyday life. In books, literary devices work alongside plot and character to elevate a story and prompt reflection on life, society, and what it means to be human. We think the same should be true of the objects that accompany us through the day.

Author Clock tells time through literary quotes, turning each minute into something you can read. Author Forecast does the same for weather, using language to translate changing conditions into something you can notice. Together, they treat everyday information as material for storytelling.

And if you look closely, every literary device finds its way into what we make.

There’s tone, in the mood a quote carries into the room, shifting how the hour or forecast feels.

There’s metaphor, when the weather becomes a story and the minute becomes something you can read.

There’s allusion, in every line from fiction recalls another world or another voice.

There’s contrast, when two quotes on the same rain condition, or the same minute, pull you in entirely different directions.

There’s repetition, as the same minutes return each day but never quite feel the same when paired with a new quote.

And there’s irony, when you glance at the time or check the weather and end up reading instead.

We call what we make Literary Devices because they reveal how ordinary checks of time and weather can carry more than information. They can offer language, feeling, and a point of view. Our family of products connect the practical and the poetic, the way good writing always has.

What we’re building at Author & Co. isn’t just a collection of objects but a way of reading the world. Each creation begins with the same premise: that literature can deepen the way we move through the day. We design with the belief that the ordinary is worth paying attention to, and that language can transform even the simplest routines.

At the heart of our work is a simple conviction: to make Literary Devices in every sense of the phrase.

At Author & Co., we combine design, function, and our love of reading to create products that bring literature into your everyday life. Find out more at authorandco.com

By observing the information people seek each day—the time, the weather, the small details that define routine—we reimagine the familiar as opportunities for storytelling.

Time felt like the natural place to begin. After all, it is both the structure of daily life and the architecture of every story. We noticed how specific times appear throughout novels, as anchors in the flow of narrative. Collecting those moments became the foundation for Author Clock, the clock that tells time through literary quotes.

In 2021, engineer Jose Cardona and designer Luke Gray launched Author Clock on Kickstarter, hoping for 200 people to join in and help to raise $20,000. Instead, nearly 8,300 backers pledged over $1.3 million, proving the idea resonated far beyond expectations. Yasmin Sara Gruss joined soon after as editor, curating thousands of literary quotes, followed by Caleb Williams, who focuses on finance and operations. With production underway and a growing community, Author & Co. was officially founded.

Soon, Author Clocks began appearing in homes, bookstores, and museum shops, including the MoMA Design Store, where it was praised for “revolutioniz[ing] the concept of time telling.” In 2024, Christopher Borrelli of the Chicago Tribune captured the experience when he wrote:

“What I’ve noticed about the Author Clock is how we use time to memorialize an instant—to recognize the flat tick of the everyday.”

We’ve spoken with writers who use the clock in their creative practice and readers who’ve discovered their next book from a passing quote. Seeing the clock settle into daily use made clear how literature can illuminate the way we mark and interpret time. A quote at 3:27 p.m. appears in vastly different settings: a sunlit cottage, a city high-rise, a quiet kitchen, a rural bookshop. And this single quote becomes a shared reference point, filtered through mood, surroundings, and personal experience.

In 2025, we extended that concept to Author Forecast, integrating 27 live weather conditions with literary passages. It offers a similar kind of connection, though not through identical skies but a shared habit of attention. Across cities and landscapes, people glance up at different weather—rain, sunshine, snow—and meet it through language.

At Author & Co., we’re building a practice for people who live with books, creating tools that invite close reading and reflection throughout the day. Beyond the products themselves, we’re cultivating a way of looking at the ordinary as something worth reading.

That’s why we’re here on Substack: to share what makes us tick, reflect on the ideas that guide our approach to design and storytelling, and invite you into the conversation. At times, we’ll speak to a range of experts, from authors to designers to scientists and beyond, to explore how literature and design shape perception, how daily routines intersect with the built and natural world, and how stories and objects influence the habits and passage of everyday life.

This is a community grounded in attention, where literature isn’t background but a way of seeing and connecting.

At Author & Co., we combine design, function, and our love of reading to create products that bring literature into your everyday life. Find out more at authorandco.com