Price
$14.95
Temporarily Out of Stock
Darkly funny account of the office worker's mindset by the celebrated French novelist A long-suffering employee in a big corporation has summoned up the courage to ask for a raise. But as he runs through the looming encounter in his mind, his neuroses come to the surface: What is the best day to see the boss? What if he doesn't offer you a seat when you go into his office? The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise is a hilarious account of an employee losing his identity--and possibly his sanity--as he tries to put on the most acceptable face for the corporate world, with its rigid hierarchies and hostility to new ideas. If he follows a certain course of action, so this logic goes, he will succeed--but, in accepting these conditions, are his attempts to challenge his world of work doomed from the outset? Neurotic and pessimistic, yet endearing, comic and never less than entertaining, Perec's Woody Allen-esque underling presents an acute and penetrating vision of the world of office work, as pertinent today as it was when it was written in 1968.
Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise
$14.95
Temporarily Out of Stock
Description
“One of the most singular literary personalities in the world, a writer who resembled absolutely no one else.”
—Italo Calvino
“A satire for the author’s day and oh yes our own on the subtly crushing effects of corporate life … [a] delectable and philosophical office farce.”
—Steven Poole, Guardian
The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise—neurotic and pessimistic, yet endearing, comic, and never less than entertaining—is a penetrating vision of the world of office work. As translator David Bellos writes, it shows us what ‘computers, perhaps even those powered today by AI, simply cannot do: make us laugh and make us cry’.
This playful novel originated with a 1968 invitation from IBM, then searching for a writer to explore the use of computers in literature. Georges Perec took up the invite and programmed an early computer to follow the steps an employee of a large corporation would take to submit a successful request for a raise. (Perec himself was such a lowly employee at the time, his prospects of getting a raise as dim as those of the narrator of this tale.) From that algorithmic experiment grew this pioneering and enduring fiction.
—Italo Calvino
“A satire for the author’s day and oh yes our own on the subtly crushing effects of corporate life … [a] delectable and philosophical office farce.”
—Steven Poole, Guardian
The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise—neurotic and pessimistic, yet endearing, comic, and never less than entertaining—is a penetrating vision of the world of office work. As translator David Bellos writes, it shows us what ‘computers, perhaps even those powered today by AI, simply cannot do: make us laugh and make us cry’.
This playful novel originated with a 1968 invitation from IBM, then searching for a writer to explore the use of computers in literature. Georges Perec took up the invite and programmed an early computer to follow the steps an employee of a large corporation would take to submit a successful request for a raise. (Perec himself was such a lowly employee at the time, his prospects of getting a raise as dim as those of the narrator of this tale.) From that algorithmic experiment grew this pioneering and enduring fiction.
Description
“One of the most singular literary personalities in the world, a writer who resembled absolutely no one else.”
—Italo Calvino
“A satire for the author’s day and oh yes our own on the subtly crushing effects of corporate life … [a] delectable and philosophical office farce.”
—Steven Poole, Guardian
The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise—neurotic and pessimistic, yet endearing, comic, and never less than entertaining—is a penetrating vision of the world of office work. As translator David Bellos writes, it shows us what ‘computers, perhaps even those powered today by AI, simply cannot do: make us laugh and make us cry’.
This playful novel originated with a 1968 invitation from IBM, then searching for a writer to explore the use of computers in literature. Georges Perec took up the invite and programmed an early computer to follow the steps an employee of a large corporation would take to submit a successful request for a raise. (Perec himself was such a lowly employee at the time, his prospects of getting a raise as dim as those of the narrator of this tale.) From that algorithmic experiment grew this pioneering and enduring fiction.
—Italo Calvino
“A satire for the author’s day and oh yes our own on the subtly crushing effects of corporate life … [a] delectable and philosophical office farce.”
—Steven Poole, Guardian
The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise—neurotic and pessimistic, yet endearing, comic, and never less than entertaining—is a penetrating vision of the world of office work. As translator David Bellos writes, it shows us what ‘computers, perhaps even those powered today by AI, simply cannot do: make us laugh and make us cry’.
This playful novel originated with a 1968 invitation from IBM, then searching for a writer to explore the use of computers in literature. Georges Perec took up the invite and programmed an early computer to follow the steps an employee of a large corporation would take to submit a successful request for a raise. (Perec himself was such a lowly employee at the time, his prospects of getting a raise as dim as those of the narrator of this tale.) From that algorithmic experiment grew this pioneering and enduring fiction.
ISBN
9781804298510
Publisher
Publication Date
June 24, 2025
Binding
Paperback
Item Condition
New
Language
English
Pages
96
Keywords
Fiction | Humorous | Dark Humor; Fiction | Literary; Fiction | Satire; Fiction | Absurdist
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