The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century

Now in paperback, The Employees chronicles the fate of the interstellar 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.

ISBN-13: 9780811234825

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation

Publication Date: 02-07-2023

Pages: 144

Product Dimensions: 4.40(w) x 7.10(h) x 0.40(d)

Olga Ravn (born 1986) is a Danish novelist and poet. In collaboration with the Danish publisher Gyldendal she edited a selection of Tove Ditlevsen’s writings that relaunched Ditlevsen readership worldwide. Her novel The Employees was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize. SOPHIA HERSI SMITH and JENNIFER RUSSELL are translators living in Copenhagen. Together, they have translated fiction and poetry by Danish writers such as Tove Ditlevsen, Marianne Larsen, and Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild. MARTIN AITKEN has translated numerous novels from Danish and Norwegian, including works by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Peter Hoeg, Ida Jessen, and Kim Leine. He won the PEN Translation Prize for his translation of Hanne Orstavik’s Love.