Confessions from a Dark Wood
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
You have received a business card. It invites you into the world of global capital brand management consultancy. You’ll meet Nick, a hapless pawn in the world of global capital brand management consulting. And his girlfriend Sadie Parish, the first domestic suicide bomber. And his boss, emperor of b******t, Pontius J. LaBar. And PJ’s dreaded orangutan. Their story is a hilarious, heartbreaking, painfully smart satire that guides you through the high dollar swamps of modern industry.
The world of Eric Raymond’s winning novel may be the ‘post-idea economy,’ but rest assured, the book is never post-smart, or post-funny. It’s a rollicking and inventive corporate (and cultural) satire — get in now at the ground floor, people.
-SAM LIPSYTE, author of The Ask
In a world where cash has become language, Eric Raymond’s Confessions from a Dark Wood wastes no syllable in converting cultural mechanisms into a well-oiled, wise-cracking machine. Smart as Saunders, tight as Ellis, but banking waters of its own, after this one we’ll no longer ‘forget they built the Magic Kingdom on swamps.’
-BLAKE BUTLER, author of Nothing: A Portait of Insomnia and There Is No Year
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nick Bray, the hapless former employee of a pornography company, finds fortune as a "new media" consultant in Raymond's dark take on the ad agency world. After the death of his father, Nick finds himself catapulted from his one-burrito-a-day meal plan and decrepit share house in an "up-and-coming" San Francisco neighborhood to the 1% lifestyle of a corporate executive. Pontius J. LaBar is the portly and paranoid CEO of LaBar Partners Limited, a company that seduces its employees with incomprehensible business jargon and extravagance (black AmEx cards, luxury apartments, roof decks) meant to arm them for the "trend spotting expeditions" they were supposed to undertake at all hours of the day. He is also a former prot g of Nick's late father, and Nick finds himself haunted by both men throughout the novel, as he navigates the perils of a constantly blinking BlackBerry, falling in love with a would-be suicide bomber, and near-constant domestic air travel. Sometimes inconsistent and slow, Raymond's debut nonetheless triumphs at tapping into the despairing cynicism that is the domain of disgruntled employees. This is a soothing balm for anyone who has ever felt enslaved by an office e-mail account, or fantasized about a boss being attacked by a large orangutan at a company picnic.
