Nine top books to put your job in perspective

Sophie Stein is an intern at Electric Literature. She was born in Chicago and is currently an MFA candidate at Indiana University, where she is the Fiction Editor of the Indiana Review. Her short fiction has won awards from The Hypertext Review and december magazine; her work has also appeared in The Briar Cliff Review, The Tangerine, and elsewhere.

At Electric Lit Stein tagged nine books that "tackle the clashes inherent in everyday work environments and demonstrate that there can be a light at the end of the tunnel," including:

The Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillips

This novel is an incredible blend of black comedy, thriller, and love story. Josephine has just moved with her husband to a big city, where she finds work putting strings of meaningless numbers and letters into a database. The agency responsible for the database is monolithic and perplexing, but Josephine had such difficulty getting a job that she doesn’t question it until strange things start to happen: her husband disappears overnight, and a series of “delivery failed” notices appears on her door, though nobody has her new address.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: The Beautiful Bureaucrat.

--Marshal Zeringue