The 10 best office dramas

Jonathan Lee's new novel Joy is set in an office in the City of London.

For the Observer, Lee named the ten best office dramas in print and on screen, including:

American Psycho
by Bret Easton Ellis (1991)

Take [director Steve McQueen's 2011 film] Shame, add Huey Lewis and a chainsaw, and you’ve got Bret Easton Ellis’s seminal 1991 novel and its eventual film adaptation. The sight of a severed head fails to make Patrick Bateman blink, but a glimpse of a rival’s business card – a thing of “subtle off-white” beauty boasting “tasteful thickness” and a flawless watermark – makes him instantly feverish. Is he a lone psychopath, or the inevitable product of a company which cares more about its stationery supplies than its people? Meat cleavers, nail guns, axes, knives… Bateman’s main creative outlet is his choice of weapon.

Read about another novel on the list.

American Psycho appears on John Mullan's lists of ten of the best bankers in literature and ten of the best zoos in literature, Richard Gwyn's list of ten books in which things end badly, Nick Brooks' top ten list of literary murderers and Chris Power's list of his six top books on the 1980s. It is a book that Nick Cross "Finished Reading but Wanted My Time Back Afterwards."

--Marshal Zeringue