Several People Are Typing: A GMA Book Club Pick
A Novel (Good Morning America Book Club)
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3.9 • 36 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A Good Morning America Book Club Pick! • A work-from-home comedy where WFH meets WTF. • "An absurd, hilarious romp through the haunted house of late-stage capitalism." —Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House
Told entirely through clever and captivating Slack messages, this irresistible, relatable satire of both virtual work and contemporary life is The Office for a new world.
Gerald, a mid-level employee of a New York–based public relations firm has been uploaded into the company’s internal Slack channels—at least his consciousness has. His colleagues assume it’s an elaborate gag to exploit the new work-from home policy, but now that Gerald’s productivity is through the roof, his bosses are only too happy to let him work from ... wherever he says he is.
Faced with the looming abyss of a disembodied life online, Gerald enlists his co-worker Pradeep to help him escape, and to find out what happened to his body. But the longer Gerald stays in the void, the more alluring and absurd his reality becomes. Meanwhile, Gerald’s colleagues have PR catastrophes of their own to handle in the real world. Their biggest client, a high-end dog food company, is in the midst of recalling a bad batch of food that’s allegedly poisoning Pomeranians nationwide. And their CEO suspects someone is sabotaging his office furniture. And if Gerald gets to work from home all the time, why can’t everyone? Is true love possible between two people, when one is just a line of text in an app? And what in the hell does the :dusty-stick: emoji mean?
In a time when office paranoia and politics have followed us home, Calvin Kasulke is here to capture the surprising, absurd, and fully-relatable factors attacking our collective sanity ... and give us hope that we can still find a human connection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kasulke's ambitious if underwhelming debut, a fantastical workplace comedy, unfolds via Slack messages sent by employees of a New York City PR firm. Gerald works from home, trapped indefinitely "within the confines of ." Other colleagues also find opportunities to "wfh," citing a blizzard, or kids, but one of them, Tripp, continues going into the office, where he meets Beverly, a new team member, and the two begin a secret romance. Kasulke does a good job pulling together the signifiers of office culture—the team trade pet pics and carry on inside jokes with an emoji named "dusty stick"—and they work on a campaign for a dog food company that's in crisis mode over its product allegedly containing poison. But none of these or the other internal mini dramas—such as the incessant "howling" Lydia hears or Gerald's unease-turned-existential crisis—are particularly engaging or inspiring, and things take a series of odd turns after the Slackbot AI takes over Gerald's body with his mind still stuck in the digital realm. However clever the setup is, the satire lacks bite and feels not unlike listening to a friend complain about their job. For a book about Slack, it's largely that.
Customer Reviews
Best read in ages!
I genuinely wish I had like $1200 so I could buy hardbound copies of this for every single member of my work Slack channels!!
Hilarious satirical fantasy, in which the reader feels like their real-life Slack workspace has suddenly become populated by the fun/wacky personalities of people like Kurt Vonnegut & Amy Sedaris along with one’s regular/existing office colleagues.