| Vendor | |
|---|---|
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Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik |
| Original language | |
| English | |
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| Weblink | |
| http://www.helencphillips.com/ | |
THE BEAUTIFUL BUREAUCRAT
THE BEAUTIFUL BUREAUCRAT is a short, surrealist novel that packs a punch in terms of both suspense and emotional impact.
A young wife's new job in an enigmatic organization pits her against the unfeeling machinations of the universe in this inventive and compulsively page-turning first novel Josephine has been out of work a long time, so when she is hired to work in a vast, windowless building, in a remote part of town, doing what at first appears to be a monotonous filing and cross-checking task, she's mostly just relieved that her long period of unemployment has come to an end. Never mind that the person who hired her seems not to have a face and becomes known only as The Person With Bad Breath, or that Josephine works in a pale, airless room where the walls are completely bare, save some scratches Josephine fears may have come from those who held the job before her. She can endure any job in order to be able to build a future with her husband, Joseph. Under the watchful eyes of her sinister boss and an aggressively friendly coworker, she matches names to numbers and enters both into something known only as The Database, though she knows nothing about the true nature of her job. In the evenings, Josephine returns home to one of a series of strange sublets, and to Joseph, who often greets her with candles and dinner, until one day he doesn't come home at all. Joseph also has a bureaucratic job, and the two have agreed never to discuss their work, but as Joseph grows mysteriously distant and begins to disappear more frequently without explanation, the rituals of their daily lives shift from the mundane to something decidedly more sinister. As other strange events build to a crescendo, the haunting truth about Josephine's work begins to take shape in her mind, even as something powerful is gathering its own form within her. Increasingly unmoored in her home life and uneasy in her work life, Josephine attempts to keep her paranoia in check and hold on to her sanity. But as her suspicions escalate and the terrifying truth about her work is revealed, she realizes that those she holds most dear are in fatal danger. She must race to find her way through the labyrinthine bureaucracy, an institution whose tentacles seem to extend to every corner of the city and beyond, in order to save herself and to salvage the life she's built. Both chilling and poignant, The Beautiful Bureaucrat is a novel of rare restraint and imagination. With it, Helen Phillips enters the company of Murakami, Bender, and Atwood as she twists the world we know and shows it back to us full of meaning and wonderluminous and new. Helen Phillips is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award and the Italo Calvino Prize, among others. Her collection, And Yet They Were Happy, was also a finalist for the McLaughlin-Esstman-Stearns Prize, and her work has been featured on NPR's Selected Shorts and appeared in Tin House, Electric Literature, Slice, BOMB, Mississippi Review, and PEN America. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Brooklyn College and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children.
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Book
Published 2015-08-01 by Henry Holt |