Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize, The Employees reshuffles a sci-fi voyage into a riotously original existential nightmare.\nFunny and doom-drenched, The Employees chronicles the fate of the Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members alike 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, and start aching for the same things--warmth and intimacy, loved ones who have passed, shopping and child-rearing, and far-away Earth, which now only persists in memory--even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids.\nOlga 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.\nPraise for The Employees:\nThis beautiful and moving novel, set in a workplace--a spaceship some time in the future--is by turns loving and cold, funny and deliberately prosaic; capable of building a sense of existential horror one minute then quotidian comfort and private grief the next. In deceptively simple prose, threaded on a fully achieved and ambitiously experimental structure, it asks big questions about sentience and the nature of humanity. And about what happiness might be. --2021 International Booker Prize Judges\nThe Employees is not only a disconcertingly quotidian space opera; it's also an audacious satire of corporate language and the late-capitalist workplace, and a winningly abstracted investigation into what it means to be human. --The Guardian\nEverything I;m looking for in a novel. I was obsessed from the first page to the last. A strange, beautiful, deeply intelligent and provocative investigation into humanity. The Employees is an alarmingly brilliant work of art. --Max Porter, author of Lanny\nBeautiful, sinister, gripping. A tantalizing puzzle you can never quite solve. All the reviews say that the novel is, ultimately, about what it means to be human. What makes it exceptional, however, is the way it explores the richness and strangeness of being non-human. --Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night\nWhat might result if Ursula K. Le Guin and Nell Zink had a baby. --Tank Magazine

The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century

Olga Ravn

Book*hug Press

My Work

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

After giving birth, Anna is utterly lost. She and her family move to the unfamiliar, snowy city of Stockholm. Anxiety threatens to completely engulf the new mother, who obsessively devours online news and compulsively buys clothes she can’t afford. To avoid sinking deeper into her depression, Anna forces herself to read and write.\nMy Work is a novel about the unique and fundamental experience of giving birth, mixing different literary forms – fiction, essay, poetry, memoir, and letters – to explore the relationship between motherhood, work, individuality, and literature.

Literary

Lolli Editions

Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize\nThe near-distant future. Millions of kilometres from Earth.\nThe crew of the Six-Thousand Ship consists of those who were born, and those who were made. Those who will die, and those who will not. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew is perplexed to find itself becoming deeply attached to them, and human and humanoid employees alike start aching for the same things: warmth and intimacy. Loved ones who have passed. Shopping and child-rearing. Our shared, far-away Earth, which now only persists in memory.\nGradually, the crew members come to see their work in a new light, and each employee is compelled to ask themselves whether they can carry on as before and what it means to be truly living.\nStructured as a series of witness statements compiled by a workplace commission, Ravn s crackling prose is as chilling as it is moving, as exhilarating as it is foreboding. Wracked by all kinds of longing, The Employees probes into what it means to be human, emotionally and ontologically, while simultaneously delivering an overdue critique of a life governed by work and the logic of productivity.

The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century

Contemporary

The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century (Hardcover) (Chinese Edition)

New Star Press

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Books by Olga Ravn