The Beautiful Bureaucrat - Softcover

Phillips, Helen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1782273654 ISBN 13: 9781782273653

Publisher: ONE, 2018

Synopsis

'A satisfying parable of love and life, death and birth... reads like a thriller' Joshua Ferris

'There is a grim power to this novel... A fascinating and gruelling portrait of extreme capitalism and the degradation of ordinary lives' Guardian

If the job market hadn't been so bleak during that long, humid summer, Josephine might have been discouraged from taking the administrative position in a windowless building in a remote part of town. As the days inch by, she becomes increasingly anxious - the drone of keyboards echoes eerily down the long halls, her boss has terrible breath, and there are cockroaches in the bath of her sub-let. When one evening her husband Joseph disappears and then returns offering no explanation as to his whereabouts, her creeping unease soon turns to dread...

Part modern fairytale, part existentialist thriller, this is a breathtaking joyride of a novel that asks the biggest questions about marriage and fidelity, birth and death.

About this title

Review

'There is a grim power to this novel... A fascinating and gruelling portrait of extreme capitalism and the degradation of ordinary lives' -- Guardian

'Atmospheric... claustrophobic... enjoyably absurdist' -- Financial Times

'Assured and sometimes ingenious' -- Sunday Times

'Brilliantly weird and wonderful dystopian book' -- Refinery29

'Poignant, witty and surreal by turns' --Foyles

'A creepy and unnerving read while remaining enjoyable and intriguing' -- Book and Brew

'For those looking for something a bit different to spice their summer reading' -- The Idle Woman (blog)

'Strange, compelling novella in which Phillips manages to out-Kafka Kafka' -- A Life in Books (blog)

'Deliberately blends the unsettling with the mundane... Gripping and well-executed' -- Amy's Ever-Growing Bookshelf (blog)

'Wholly original and utterly preposterous and entirely compelling' -- Josh is Writing (blog)

'A perfect "off the beaten track" holiday book, both readable and entertaining' -- The Riverside Way (blog)

'I thoroughly enjoyed this dystopian read and it keeps playing over in my mind, just who pulls the strings in our lives and how much self-control do we have over our days? The book won't give you all the answers, but where would the fun be in that?!' -- Dogeared Reads (blog)

'Darkly ambiguous, it's hard not to find yourself sucked into Helen Phillips' dystopian world' -- Pale + Interesting (blog)

'A short fabulist novel that takes the mundane reality of being a twenty-something pencil pusher in a post-crash economy and turns it into an eerie, unpredictable parallel with an element of playing God... absolutely brilliant ending' -- Robotnic (blog)

'Made me laugh on the first page... I liked the quirky prose and odd perspective' -- Kate Vane Books (blog)

'This debut novel will have the power and readability to stay in the mind a mighty long time' --The Bookbag

'Chilling... the perfect summer page-turner' -- Chicago Tribune

'Riveting... thrillerlike... Ultimately, The Beautiful Bureaucrat succeeds because it isn't afraid to ask the deepest questions' -- The New York Times Book Review

'Kafka would love The Beautiful Bureaucrat... It's a surprising revelation of a book from an uncompromising author as unique as she is talented' -- NPR

'A joyride... a very weird, very beautiful, very honest book about the surreal business of working in a city, living in a fertile and dying body, and loving another mortal' -- Slate

'Unusual... deeply interesting... irresistible... Mrs. Phillips has a wickedly funny eye, a fine sense of pacing, a smooth, winning writing style and a great gift for a telling detail... breathtaking and wondrous' -- New York Times

'Equal parts mystery, thriller, and existential inquiry... The Beautiful Bureaucrat asks uneasy questions about work and life, love and power, and where the whole enterprise of one's own small life is swiftly headed' -- New Republic

'Part dystopian fantasy, part thriller, part giddy literary-nerd wordplay, Helen Phillips' The Beautiful Bureaucrat is both a page-turner and a novel rich in evocative, starkly philosophical language... eerie, stomach-dropping... this novel ultimately proves both clever and impossible to put down' -- L.A. Times

'A bewitching parable' -- Vanity Fair

'An addictive, uncanny experience... Her prose is exact, at once ominous and droll, and her pacing is perfect. As she probes the mysteries of marriage and mortality, choice and chance, freedom and fate, her pages command close focus - and fly by very fast' -- The Atlantic

'Mesmerizing... the perfect kind of strange to keep your brain twisted into knots during a flight (think Kafka or Calvino), and the kind of thrilling that'll have you on edge until you've run out of pages to turn. You'll devour this one before wheels-down on the tarmac' -- Elle

'Uncanny and Kafkaesque... By turns, the novel is goofily funny, creepy and unsettling, life-affirming and sweet, deeply thoughtful and pointedly critical of modern workplace culture... A strange, yet unsettlingly resonant fable that melds mystery, sic-fi, romance and satire to chillingly skewer the modern workplace yet somehow leave us reaffirmed in our humanity' -- Huffington Post

'Told with the light touch of a Calvino and the warm heart of a Saramago, this brief fable-novel is funny, sad, scary and beautiful' -- Ursula K. Le Guin

'A satisfying parable of love and life, death and birth, and the travails of transposed numbers. The Beautiful Bureaucrat reads like a thriller' -- Joshua Ferris

'A thrillingly original debut, formally inventive and emotionally complex. Helen Phillips is one of the most exciting young writers working today, and I envy those who get to discover her work here for the first time' -- Jenny Offill

'The Beautiful Bureaucrat has the compulsive quality of a mystery and the furious urgency of a fever dream. I picked it up and read it everywhere: on the subway, over breakfast, in bed when I should have been sleeping, at work when I should have been working. It will coax you into its world with the crystalline precision of its prose, so flu of heart and strangeness it might even crawl into your own dreams and find you there' -- Leslie Jamison

'In the bleak hallways of bureaucracy, Helen Phillips explores what it means to ale a life one's own. The Beautiful Bureaucrat is a page-turning mystery, a love story and a revelation' --Ramona Ausubel

About the Author

Helen Phillips is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award, the Italo Calvino Prize and more. She is the author of the widely acclaimed The Beautiful Bureaucrat. Her debut collection And Yet They Were Happy was named a notable book by The Story Prize. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Electric Literature and The New York Times. An assistant professor of creative writing at Brooklyn College, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children.

About this edition

• Publisher: ONE
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1782273654
• ISBN 13: 9781782273653
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192