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The Employee
Paperback
Publisher Price: $16.95
ISBN13: 9781962728058
Publisher: Wakefield Press
Published: Aug 5 2025
Pages: 192
Weight: 0.45
Height: 0.50 Width: 5.40 Depth: 7.90
Language: English
Sternberg's rule-breaking, genre-defying novel upends the humdrum workday world
A nameless employee stands outside the door to an office, hesitating to enter because he is five minutes late. This banal opening then launches into a frenetic narrative that switches genres, modes and universes with abandon. From an account of his feral childhood with a nymphomaniacal mother, to his early development of a third arm and a second head, the employee unspools his subsequent life as department-store wrapper, ladder-descending bureaucrat, traveling salesman, murder suspect and other occupations. Years return and reverse through a series of inflicted hellscapes as a tension builds between an untrammeled imagination willing to commit any crime and the inescapable rigidity of the mind.
Jacques Sternberg (1923-2006) was a literary maverick, who wrote over 50 books that roamed freely through genre and influence without ever adhering to anything that might threaten constraint. He was briefly a member of the Panic Movement, founded by Fernando Arrabal, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland Topor.
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