I’ll tell you a secret. I’m obsessed with money—not fast cars, designer labels, and McMansions, but the accumulation of capital: who has it, how they got it, and what lengths they’re willing to go to to keep it. So I’ve always loved novels about work. They cut right to the heart of a character’s true motivations, revealing what they’ll fight for and who they’ll love. Don’t show me what a person looks like, show me how they earn (or don’t earn) their living, and I’ll remember them forever.
It’s the Hollywood event of the season, and anyone who’s anyone will be enjoying their evening at socialite Holly Stabler’s gorgeous hilltop estate. For personal assistant Zanne Klein, the gala is her chance at a promotion she’s chased for far too long, which means she’ll finally be able to buy a house, pay off her loans, and give her girlfriend the life she deserves.
But just when the perfect party seems to be in reach, Phoebe Lee, a talented director who mysteriously disappeared decades before, shows up uninvited—with a dark secret. As the event unfolds and truths are exposed, Zanne, Holly, and Phoebe are set on a collision course that promises to make the night one Hollywood will never forget…
When I picked up Tsumura’s first novel to be translated into English, I’d just given notice at my hectic corporate job. So when the burned-out narrator tells her employment agency she’s looking for an easy job that’s “ideally, something along the lines of sitting all day in a chair,” I could relate.
She searches for that elusive work-life balance at a series of strange positions, but when she lands a plum gig working in a small hut in a forest, the story’s disparate strands weave together into an emotionally satisfying whole.
"[A] 21st-century response to Herman Melville's 'Bartleby, the Scrivener.'"―NPR
"A revelation."―Time
A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: it is close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing, and ideally, very little thinking.
Her first gig--watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods--turns out to be inconvenient. (When can she go to the bathroom?) Her next gives way to the supernatural: announcing advertisements for shops that mysteriously disappear. As she moves from job to job--writing trivia for rice cracker packages; punching entry tickets…
Do you have to be captivated by aquariums and otherworldly travel to enjoy this book? No, but if, like me, you’ve always wondered what it would be like to have an octopus for a work wife or a boyfriend who’s moving to Mars, you’ll love Sea Change.
Come for the reality-bending critique of life on Earth; stay for the achingly true-to-life portrait of a daughter of Korean immigrants who’s just trying to make her way in the world.
A NEW YORK TIMES MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK • An enchanting novel about Ro, a woman tossed overboard by heartbreak and loss, who has to find her way back to stable shores with the help of a giant Pacific octopus at the mall aquarium where she works.
“Immersively beautiful.... A kaleidoscope of originality." —Weike Wang, acclaimed author of Joan is Okay
Ro is stuck. She's just entered her thirties, she's estranged from her mother, and her boyfriend has just left her to join a mission to Mars. Her days are spent dragging herself to her menial job at the aquarium, and…
Jess is a Black liberal from Nebraska starting her first post-college job at Goldman Sachs. Josh is her white, conservative coworker from Connecticut and former thorn in her side from undergrad.
Watching these two opposites attract during the Obama-Trump transition was the most fun I ever had (the banter is top-notch) and had me squirming with its hyper-realistic portrayal of America’s political polarization. Will Jess and Josh’s love survive, or will it suffer death by a thousand microaggressions? Everything’s Fine is a romance wrapped in an enigma.
I spent my summers during college doing odd jobs as a temp, but even readers who’ve never known anything but “the steadiness” at work will enjoy this mythical look at the gig economy.
The unnamed narrator, born from a long line of temps, takes pride in her ability to “accurately replace a person,” whether that’s a pirate, an assassin, or even the chairman of the board. This book is for anyone who’s ever wondered what it would take not just to survive their job but to transcend it.
In Temporary, a young woman’s workplace is the size of the world. She fills increasingly bizarre placements in search of steadiness, connection, and something, at last, to call her own. Whether it’s shining an endless closet of shoes, swabbing the deck of a pirate ship, assisting an assassin, or filling in for the Chairman of the Board, for the mythical Temporary, “there is nothing more personal than doing your job.”
This riveting quest, at once hilarious and profound, will resonate with anyone who has ever done their best at work, even when the work is only temporary.
Bunny Glenn is confused about a lot of things: home and where to find it; the force of her appetites; how people figure out what work is right for them; and oil—the ultimate hyper object that touches every aspect of modern life and makes us all complicit in its extraction.
After years of adulting in late-stage capitalism and feeling trapped in a series of intersecting double-binds, I was ready for a book like this, one that asks urgent questions about our world while recognizing the bewildering inertia that so often accompanies the answers.
“A masterpiece of misdirection.” ―Geraldine Brooks
“Mobility is a truly gripping coming-of-age story about navigating a world of corporate greed that’s both laugh-out-loud funny and politically incisive.” ―Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor
Bunny Glenn believes in climate change. But she also likes to get paid.
The year is 1998. The Soviet Union is dissolved, the Cold War is over, and Bunny Glenn is a lonely American teenager in Azerbaijan with her Foreign Service family. Through Bunny’s bemused eyes, we watch global interests flock to her temporary backyard for Caspian oil and pipeline access, hearing rumbles of the expansion…
A young adult and epic fantasy novel that begins an entire series, as yet unfinished, about a young girl named Melody who discovers that the pier she lives near goes on forever—a pier that was destroyed by a hurricane that appeared out of blue skies in mere moments in 1983.
Melody doesn't know it, but a king has been searching for her for more than twenty years—longer than she's been alive. His kingdom is readying for the day when they may return to the world found beyond the end of that very pier, a world cast into darkness by an…
Melody and the Pier to Forever: Parts Five and Six
Melody Singleton is a bright 13-year-old girl who loves math, classical music, her mom, her best friend Yaeko, and her dog. To her classmates that makes her a nerd, and they cruelly treat her as such. After being expelled from the advanced algebra class for not paying attention, she meets her new teacher, Mr. Conor, who gives her a very strange homework assignment. You see, she got kicked out because she was distracted by a symbol that the rest of us can't see, a beautiful sigil that, incredibly, Mr. Conor can see too, because it's on the assignment he gave…
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Coming Of Age
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