No one knows us quite the same way as the men and women who sit beside us in department meetings and crowd the office refrigerator with their labeled yogurts.? Every office is a family of sorts, and the ad agency Joshua Ferris brilliantly depicts in his debut novel is family at its strangest and best, coping with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks.
???? With a demon's eye for the details that make life worth noticing, Joshua Ferris tells a true and funny story about survival in life's strangest environment--the one we pretend is normal five days a week.
Joshua Ferris's first novel,
Then We Came to the End, won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, and was a National Book Award finalist. It has been translated into 24 languages. His fiction has appeared in
The New Yorker,
Granta, Best New American Voices, New Stories from the South,
Prairie Schooner, and
The Iowa Review. He lives in
New York. What looks at first glancelike a sweet-tempered satire of workplace culture is revealed upon closerinspection to be a very serious novel about, well, America. It may even be, inits own modest way, a great American novel. ?
Los Angeles Times A masterwork of pitch and tone. . . . Ferris brilliantly captures the fishbowl quality of contemporary office life.
The New Yorker Not too many authors have written the Great American Office Novel. Joseph Heller did it in
Something Happened(the one book of his to rival
Catch-22). And Nicholson Baker pulled it off in zanily fastidious fashion in
The Mezzanine.To their ranks should be added Joshua Ferris, whose THEN WE CAME TO THE END feels like a readymade classic of the genre. . . . A truly affecting novel about work, trust, love, and loneliness.
Michael Upchurch,
lăN
![Then We Came to the End A Novel [Paperback]](/itemImage/2/4/8/6/2_472050.jpg "Then We Came to the End A Novel [Paperback] xxx")