The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise

The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise

  • Paperback

Darkly funny account of the office worker’s mindset by the celebrated French novelist

A long-suffering employee in a big corporation has summoned up the courage to ask for a raise. But as he runs through the looming encounter in his mind, his neuroses come to the surface: What is the best day to see the boss? What if he doesn’t offer you a seat when you go into his office?

The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise is a hilarious account of an employee losing his identity—and possibly his sanity—as he tries to put on the most acceptable face for the corporate world,with its rigid hierarchies and hostility to new ideas. If he follows a certain course of action, so this logic goes, he will succeed—but, in accepting these conditions, are his attempts to challenge his world of work doomed from the outset?

Neurotic and pessimistic, yet endearing, comic and never less than entertaining, Perec’s Woody Allen-esque underling presents an acute and penetrating vision of the world of office work, as pertinent today as it was when it was written in 1968.

Reviews

  • Its wit and comedy encourage compulsive consumption.

    David O'NeillBarnes and Noble Review
  • A hilarious and inventive office-drone odyssey.

    Bookforum
  • We readers will have to deal with the fortunate burden of clearing shelf-space for another novel by Perec this spring, with the first English translation of The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise.

    Most Anticipated Books of 2011, The Millions