| Author/Contributor(s): | Perec, Georges; Bellos, David |
| Publisher: | Verso |
| Date: | 6/24/2025 |
| Binding: | Paperback |
| Condition: | NEW |
—Italo Calvino
“A satire for the author’s day and oh yes our own on the subtly crushing effects of corporate life … [a] delectable and philosophical office farce.”
—Steven Poole, Guardian
The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise—neurotic and pessimistic, yet endearing, comic, and never less than entertaining—is a penetrating vision of the world of office work. As translator David Bellos writes, it shows us what ‘computers, perhaps even those powered today by AI, simply cannot do: make us laugh and make us cry’.
This playful novel originated with a 1968 invitation from IBM, then searching for a writer to explore the use of computers in literature. Georges Perec took up the invite and programmed an early computer to follow the steps an employee of a large corporation would take to submit a successful request for a raise. (Perec himself was such a lowly employee at the time, his prospects of getting a raise as dim as those of the narrator of this tale.) From that algorithmic experiment grew this pioneering and enduring fiction.