Critic Reviews
Good
Based on 7 reviews on
No longer able to live on the proceeds of her freelance writing and translating income, German novelist Heike Geissler takes a seasonal job at Amazon Order Fulfillment in Leipzig. But the job, intended as a stopgap measure, quickly becomes a descent into humiliation, and Geissler soon begins to internalize the dynamics and nature of the post-capitalist labor market and precarious work. Driven to work at Amazon by financial necessity rather than journalistic ambition, Heike Geissler has nonetheless written the first and only literary account of corporate flex-time employment that offers "freedom" to workers who have become an expendable resource. Shifting between the first and the second person, Seasonal Associate is a nuanced expose of the psychic damage that is an essential working condition with mega-corporations. Geissler has written a twenty-first-century account of how the brutalities of working life are transformed into exhaustion, shame, and self-doubt.
Editorial Director, University of Oklahoma Press. Personal account. Also: @aberzanskis.bsky.social
@brouillettese Would "working in publishing" include warehouse workers, whose labor is essential for print books to reach their readers? Perhaps Paul Juhasz's "Fulfillment: Diary of a Warehouse Picker" or Heike Geissler's "Seasonal Associate."
drinking iced tea, working in book sales, stealing finnish valor. it rhymes with pals
Here are some favorite books that happen to be translated: Seasonal Associate by Heike Geissler translated by Katy Derbyshire, Interior by Thomas Clerc translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman, and August by Romina Paula translated by Jennifer Croft https://t.co/Bul99ATAj7
At Harvard, but not OF Harvard, writes abt the 18th & 19th centuries & abt books, their reading, & sometimes non-reading. At the OTHER sites w/ same handle
@paulnadal_ Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate, Ling Ma’s Severance, Ali Smith’s Summer (because of the part of the novel centred on Brittany Hall, the character working in the migrant detention centre)
Geissler's account of her time at Amazon is more than a workplace exposé. Hovering somewhere between memoir, cultural criticism, and fiction, it's a compelling meditation on the psychological and physical harm of working for a large corporation in a society driven by neoliberal economic goals.
--Christian Century--...Geissler is exploring questions of labor and identity in the twenty-first century and the ways in which work does and does not define us. If this book was simply a chronicle of her time working at Amazon, it would be compelling enough--but the narrative risks she takes pay off, making it so much more.
--Words Without Borders--...a bleak meditation on 21st-century drudgery.
--The Guardian--In its broadest sense, it is a meditation on the psychological impact of precarious modern work, of how it can settle inside your bones and hollow out the things that make you human.
--Ozy--I haven't ever read anything quite like it. The story follows a freelance writer low on cash who takes on a short-term contract at Amazon's Leipzig warehouse through the winter season. If you're interested in precarious work, the gig economy and how to find a language that accurately describes the emotional landscape of modern work, then this is for you!
--Verso Books----Review Architecture--