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Book Cover for: The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century, Olga Ravn

The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century

Olga Ravn

Paperback
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Reader Score

72%

72% of readers

recommend this book

Critic Reviews

Good

Based on 8 reviews on

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Shortlist:International Booker Prize - (2021)
Nominee:National Book Award -Translation (2022)
Now in paperback, The Employees chronicles the fate of the interstellar Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew becomes strangely and deeply attached to them, even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids.
Olga Ravn's prose is chilling, crackling, exhilarating, and foreboding. The Employees probes into what makes us human, while delivering a hilariously stinging critique of life governed by the logic of productivity.

Book Details

  • Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
  • Publish Date: Feb 7th, 2023
  • Pages: 144
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 6.90in - 4.60in - 0.60in - 0.25lb
  • EAN: 9780811234825
  • Categories: • World Literature - Denmark• Literary• Science Fiction - Genetic Engineering

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About the Author

Aitken, Martin: - MARTIN AITKEN has translated numerous novels from Danish and Norwegian, including works by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Peter Høeg, Ida Jessen, and Kim Leine. He won the PEN Translation Prize for his translation of Hanne Ørstavik's Love.
Ravn, Olga: -

Olga Ravn (born 1986) is a Danish novelist and poet. In collaboration with Danish publisher Gyldendal she edited a selection of Tove Ditlevsen's texts and books that relaunched Ditlevsen's readership worldwide. Her novel The Employees was on the shortlist for the Booker Prize in 2021.

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What people are saying

Mentioner image for: The New York Review of Books
The New York Review of Books
2 years

"What the Employees captures best is humanity’s ambivalence about life itself, its sticky messes and unappealing functions, the goo that connects us to everything that crawls and mindlessly self-propagates...It is our best beloved and it turns our stomachs."

– Laura Miller is a books and culture columnists for Slate.
Mentioner image for: WIRED
WIRED
2 years

"This was the most entrancing reading experience I had all year. Ravn’s hypnotic, elliptical storytelling about a journey to an alien land gone wrong reminded me of Jeff van der Meer’s Annihilation. (Heavy on foreboding, borderline-sinister atmosphere, light on exposition.)"

– Kate Knibbs is a writer.
wired.com
Mentioner image for: Lauren Groff
Lauren Groff
@legroff
2 years

Lauren Groff is an author.

Anyway, these are among the best books I’ve read recently: Jon Fosse’s Septology (tr. Damion Searls) and The Employees by @OlgaRavn (tr. Martin Aitken). Both bonkers, moving, dazzlingly risky; both set their own exquisite terms. https://t.co/5H5IoSp5Yc

twitter.com
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Critics’ reviews

Praise for this book

A deeply sensory book, suffused with aroma and alert to tactility... The Employees is not only a disconcertingly quotidian space opera; it's also an audacious satire of corporate language and the late-capitalist workplace, and a winningly abstracted investigation into what it means to be human... This clever, endlessly thought-provoking novel catches something of our recursive search for the nature of consciousness; a question that answers itself, a voice in the darkness, an object moving through space.--Justine Jordan "Guardian"
Beautiful, sinister, gripping. A tantalizing puzzle you can never quite solve. All the reviews say that the novel is, ultimately, about what it means to be human. What makes it exceptional, however, is the way it explores the richness and strangeness of being non-human.--Mark Haddon
What might result if Ursula K. Le Guin and Nell Zink had a baby.-- "Tank Magazine"
An achingly beautiful mosaic of fragile characters managing their longing, pain, and alienation. This gorgeous, evocative novel is well worth the effort.-- "Publishers Weekly"
In brief numbered statements delivered by the human and nonhuman crew of the Six Thousand Ship to a shadowy committee, Ravn seeds her narrative with direct and allegorical reflections on transhumanism, disappearing nature, and the ambiguities of being embodied... The novel is by turns queasily exact about what is seen--skin pitted like pomegranate, an object's furrows oozing some nameless balm--and willfully obscure. Ambiguity is everything: "I don't know if I'm human anymore. Am I human? Does it say in your files what I am?"--Brian Dillon "4columns"
The Employees asks important questions about what makes up human consciousness, and also, critiques corporate language that can make its way into our lives sometimes without us knowing. It's very funny. It's very interesting. I definitely recommend checking this one out.--Corinne Segal "WNYC"
A book that strikes a rare balance between SF philosophy and workaday feeling all while whirling through space.-- "Kirkus"
The most striking aspect of this weird, beautiful, and occasionally disgusting novel is not, as its subtitle implies, its portrayal of working life on the spaceship. What The Employees captures best is humanity's ambivalence about life itself, its sticky messes and unappealing functions, the goo that connects us to everything that crawls and mindlessly self-propagates, not to mention that obliterating payoff at the end of it all.--Laura Miller "New York Review of Books"
An alarmingly brilliant work of art--Max Porter
Few stories today are as sublimely strange and their own thing as Olga Ravn's The Employees. This disorienting, mind-bending expanse recalls as much the poetry of Aase Berg as the workplace fiction of Thomas Ligotti. Something marvelously sui generis for the jaded.--Jeff VanderMeer

What people are saying

Mentioner image for: The New York Review of Books
The New York Review of Books
2 years

"What the Employees captures best is humanity’s ambivalence about life itself, its sticky messes and unappealing functions, the goo that connects us to everything that crawls and mindlessly self-propagates...It is our best beloved and it turns our stomachs."

– Laura Miller is a books and culture columnists for Slate.
Mentioner image for: WIRED
WIRED
2 years

"This was the most entrancing reading experience I had all year. Ravn’s hypnotic, elliptical storytelling about a journey to an alien land gone wrong reminded me of Jeff van der Meer’s Annihilation. (Heavy on foreboding, borderline-sinister atmosphere, light on exposition.)"

– Kate Knibbs is a writer.
wired.com
See more