Buy it now
Personal Days
Finalist, Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award
Finalist, Asian American Literary Award
Finalist, John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize
A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice
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
“Witty and appealing… Park has written ‘a layoff narrative’ for our times.”
—Mark Sarvas, The New York Times Book Review
“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 Our Country Friends
“Never have the minutiae of office life been so lovingly catalogued and collated.”
—Lev Grossman, Time
“The modern corporate office is to Ed Park’s debut novel Personal Dayswhat 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
A satirical tour-de-force.”
—Robert Christgau, The New York Observer
“This black comedy about downsizing brings an almost Beckett-like sense of reduction to the dwindling office.”
—Douglas Rushkoff, BoingBoing
“As much a novel as a series of pitch-perfect comic vignettes of working life, Personal Days is the ideal book to read under the table during the next staff training seminar. Park has strayed into Ricky Gervais’s territory and may soon be its king.”
—Francesca Segal, The Guardian
“From the stinging embarrassment of the company softball team’s record-setting losses to the odd, enchanting power of a Post-it, Park repeatedly finds ways to turn the minutiae of office work into exciting, inviting prose.” —Lee Ellis, The New Yorker
“This excellent little book sits gloating atop the ash-heap of corporate history.”
—James Parker, The Atlantic