3.5 

The Employees

By Olga Ravn & Martin Aitken
The Employees by Olga Ravn & Martin Aitken digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

Shortlisted for the International Booker prize and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize, The Employees reshuffles a sci-fi voyage into a riotously original existential nightmare

Longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award

Funny and doom-drenched, The Employees chronicles the fate of the Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew becomes strangely and deeply attached to them, even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids.

Olga Ravn’s prose is chilling, crackling, exhilarating, and foreboding. The Employees probes into what makes us human, while delivering a hilariously stinging critique of life governed by the logic of productivity. It was shortlisted for the the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize. 

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The Employees Reviews

3.5
“This book made me quit my job. That’s a bit dramatic, but it is FULL of ideas that show corporate operations as soul-sucking and dehumanizing as I have found corporate jobs to be. It does a great job of conveying the quiet melancholy of turning your energy and life over for a job that may not have any meaning beyond the success of the overall organization, regardless of what the organization does. Would recommend.”
““I live, the way numbers live, and the stars; the way tanned hide ripped from the belly of an animal lives, and nylon rope; the way an object lives, in communion with another. I’m like one of those objects. You made me, you gave me language, and now I see your failings and deficiencies. I see your inadequate plans.””

About Olga Ravn

Olga Ravn (born 1986) is a Danish novelist and poet. In collaboration with Danish publisher Gyldendal she edited a selection of Tove Ditlevsen’s texts and books that relaunched Ditlevsen’s readership worldwide. Her novel The Employees was on the shortlist for the Booker Prize in 2021, and The Wax Child was on the longlist for the Booker International Prize and the shortlist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Translation in 2026.

 

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