5 Books About the Office That Don’t Feel Like Work

Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris
Many writers have attempted to write the Great American Novel. Ferris aimed for (and achieved) something a little different: the Great American Office Novel. Ferris’s “small, angry book about work” takes place in an advertising agency right around the Dot-Com Bust. Amid the resulting layoffs, the true pleasure here, not unlike a regular workday, comes from the water cooler gossip through which the story unfolds. In this little ecosystem are the office snoops and loners, the bored and the anxious—all your least favorite characters gathered here in a place where they can’t hurt you.

Personal Days, by Ed Park
Liked reading about layoffs not happening to you? Then get another dose with Park’s debut about an anxious bunch of coworkers bracing themselves for an onslaught of firings. An alarming microscope of the everyday oddities of America’s workforce, Personal Days lets no awful detail escape examination, including feeble attempts to improve morale and that 9-to-5 scourge: the email (e.g., “The exclamation points look downright psychotic”). As the firings commence, the swirl of sabotage, intrigue, and utter paranoia will have you wishing for the weekend—so you can finish reading.

The Room, by Jonas Karlsson
Raise your hand if you’ve ever wished for your own private room to escape your coworkers’ discussion of their children’s/pets’s/spouses’s bowel movements. Karlsson’s compulsive and compulsively clever Bjorn has just such a room. The trouble—or maybe the miracle—is that Bjorn is the only one who can see it, so his increasingly disgruntled officemates instead see Bjorn staring happy, relaxed, dazed, and rejuvenated at a wall. Think of it as business-casual Kafka. As you can expect, this is a surefire sign of an impending thermonuclear HR situation. What makes this tale more tantalizing is Bjorn’s unreliability as a narrator, so as the tensions rise, you’ll just keep guessing.

The Intern’s Handbook, by Shane Kuhn
Depending on the workplace, the lowly intern can either be the lowest rung on the ladder, or the subterranean bedrock upon which the ladder rests. But you might want to think twice before drinking that coffee after you read Kuhn’s yarn about assassins disguised as interns. When you think about it, the situation makes perfect sense: an intern has access to loads of intel within a company, but attracts the least amount of attention. In fact, it makes so much sense, you might never go to work again. You’re welcome.

Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, by Nikil Saval
To anyone who has ever resided within a cubicle, the design of the boxy hellscape can seem stranger than fiction. So it seems prudent to include one piece of nonfiction: Saval’s chronicle of how the workplace became “rationalized” and “efficient.” It’s not all bad news though. While Cubed traces this history of how the modern workplace came to be, it also hypothesizes about the future, when we serfs might break free of our square environs and work when and where we want—or you know, when we might work all the time from everywhere. Okay, so maybe that’s not exactly a utopia.
What’s your favorite book about office life?