Personal Days

(Paperback)

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Description

'The Office' meets Don DeLillo in this hilarious debut novel by the founding editor of The Believer. Ever wondered what your boss does all dayOr if there is a higher - perhaps an existential - significance to Microsoft Word malfunctions Filled with sabotage and romance and capturing the relentless monotony and paranoia of office life with unnerving precision, Personal Days is a scathingly funny look at a group of office workers who have no idea what the unnamed corporation they work for actually does. When it looks like the company may be taken over, fear of redundancy unleashes a delicious mystery. Meet Pru, the ex-graduate turned spreadsheet drone; Laars, the hysteric whose work anxiety follows him into tooth-grinding dreams; and Jonah, the secret striver who must pick his allegiance... Each struggling to figure out who among them is trying to bring down the company, and why.

Reviews

As much a novel of pitch-perfect comic vignettes of working life, Personal Days is the ideal book to read under the table during the next staff training seminar. Park has strayed into Ricky Gervais' territory and may soon be its king * Observer *
The funniest novel of office life in decades... A must-read * Daily Mail *
Anyone missing Joshua Ferris' Then We Came To The End should pick up this novel * Esquire *
Park's wry look at lives ruled by unreliable computers and bad coffee speaks volumes about the choices we make in the name of ambition * The Times *
Personal Days is amusingly spare, yet soon becomes something darker, aspiring perhaps to the unblinking horror of Joseph Heller's corporate schlub epic Something Happened * The List *

Author Bio

Ed Park was born in 1970 in Buffalo, New York. He is a founding editor of The Believer and the former editor Voice Literary Supplement. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere. He lives with his family in Manhattan, where he publishes The New York Ghost.