In an unnamed New York-based company, the employees are getting restless
as everything around them unravels. There's Pru, the former grad student
turned spreadsheet drone; Laars, the hysteric whose work anxiety stalks
him in his tooth-grinding dreams; and Jack II, who distributes unwanted
backrubs-aka "jackrubs"-to his co-workers.
On a Sunday, one of them is called at home. And the Firings begin.
Rich with Orwellian doublespeak, filled with sabotage and romance, this
astonishing literary debut is at once a comic delight and a narrative
tour de force. It's a novel for anyone who has ever worked in an office
and wondered: "Where does the time go? Where does the life go? And whose
banana is in the fridge?"
Praise for PERSONAL DAYS
"Witty and appealing...Anyone who has ever groaned to hear 'impact' used
as a verb will cheer as Park skewers the avatars of corporate speak,
hellbent on debasing the language....Park has written what one of his
characters calls 'a layoff narrative' for our times. As the economy
continues its free fall, Park's book may serve as a handy guide for
navigating unemployment and uncertainty. Does anyone who isn't a
journalist think there can't be two books on the same subject at the
same time? We need as many as we can get right now." --***The New York
Times Book Review
"Never have the minutiae of office life been so lovingly cataloged and
collated." --"Three First Novels that Just Might Last," --***Time
A "comic and creepy début...Park transforms the banal into the eerie,
rendering ominous the familiar request "Does anyone want anything from
the outside world?" *--The New Yorker
*
"The modern corporate office is to Ed Park's debut novel Personal
Days what World War II was to Joseph Heller's Catch-22--a theater of
absurdity and injustice so profound as to defy all reason....Park may be
in line to fill the shoes left by Kurt Vonnegut and other satirists par
excellence."--Samantha Dunn, *Los Angeles Times
*
"In Personal Days Ed Park has crafted a sometimes funny, sometimes
heartbreaking, but always adroit novel about office life...Sharp and
lovely language." **--Newsweek
**
"A warm and winning fiction debut." -- Publishers Weekly
"I laughed until they put me in a mental hospital. But Personal Days
is so much more than satire. Underneath Park's masterly portrait of
wasted workaday lives is a pulsating heart, and an odd, buoyant hope."
**-- Gary Shteyngart, author of *Absurdistan
"The funniest book I've read about the way we work now." **-William
Poundstone, author of Fortune's Formula
**
"Ed Park joins Andy Warhol and Don DeLillo as a master of the deadpan
vernacular." --Helen DeWitt, author of The Last Samurai
