Overqualified - Softcover

Joey Comeau

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1550228587 ISBN 13: 9781550228588

Publisher: ECW Press, 2009

Synopsis

A startling work of fiction told through job application cover letters. Looking for work is an exercise in selling oneself. Cover letters are written listing the parts that one respects the least and the key selling points of the soul. The mistakes of the past are left unmentioned. Maybe sometimes something snaps and the writer reveals something completely new. In Overqualified the narrator's letters are funny and outrageous, but also moving too. Hopes and fears become the focus. And so he writes to HBO, ""I want a job fighting professional boxers on your cable network...

About this title

Review:

"A collection of wry, clever and demoniacal job-application letters, teeming with knife-edged malice and stomach-tearing hilarity . . . Successfully deludes the fear of the faceless corporate entity by empowering the faceless applicant." --"Globe and Mail"

"A sometimes-hilarious, sometimes-crushingly sad romp through a man's swelling nihilism and disenchantment. --MonstersAndCritics.com

""Overqualified"'s cover letters are like a slap in the face, but the slap is hilarious, and you can't stop laughing, and as soon as it's over you want to tell all your friends about the slap. You know the kind?" --Ryan North, Dinosaur Comics

"Joey Comeau's "Overqualified" is Judy Blume's "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret" as chewed up and spit out by J. G. Ballard. . . . A book whose melancholy is leavened by a surprising hilarity." --Paul Di Filippo, author, "The Steampunk Triology" and "Cosmocopia"

"Unlike anything you've ever read. Each of Joey Comeau's letters comments, sometimes subtley, sometimes not, on the emptiness of the system . . . while it simultaneously reveals the humor, beauty, and pain that is all else in life." --About.com

"There have been spoof letter-writing books in the past, like "The Lazlo Letters" by Don Novello (a.k.a. Father Guido Sarducci) and several that followed. While [this] protagonist in is just as unhinged as his predecessors, he's significantly less giddy. A real story unfolds in these pages, about a departed brother and the sibling left behind. It's sad and fragmented and, in places, funny. This slender epistolary novel is charming." --"Los Angeles Times" Jacket Copy online

"Joey Comeau's collection of real cover letters, "Overqualified, " is pretty much sui generis. Not to mention sweetly written, bitter and bitterly funny . . . One of the season's most remarkable books." --Macleans.ca

"Joey Comeau has made the unreadable not just readable, but beguiling in its digressions and personal revelations." "--Eye Magazine"

About the Author:

Joey Comeau is the author of "Lockpick Pornography" and "Too Late to Say I'm Sorry," as well as the popular web comic "A Softer World." He lives in Toronto, Ontario.

About this edition

• Publisher: ECW Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1550228587
• ISBN 13: 9781550228588
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144