Jealousy toward the aloof and 'inscrutable' middle manager Joe Pope spins out of control. Gonzo e-mailer Tom Mota quotes Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the midst of his tirades, desperately trying to retain a shred of integrity at a job that requires a ruthless attention to what will make people buy things. Indignation rises over the rightful owner of a particularly coveted chair ('We felt deceived'). In this wildly funny debut from former ad man Ferris, a group of copywriters and designers at a Chicago ad agency face layoffs at the end of the '90s boom. Louis Post-Dispatch * Time magazine * Salon With a demon's eye for the details that make life worth noticing, Joshua Ferris tells an emotionally true and funny story about survival in life's strangest environment-the one we pretend is normal five days a week.īoston Globe * Christian Science Monitor * New York Magazine * New York Times Book Review * St. Every office is a family of sorts, and the Chicago ad agency depicted in Joshua Ferris's exuberantly acclaimed first novel is family at its best and worst, coping with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, elaborate pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks. No one knows us in quite the same way as the men and women who sit beside us in department meetings and crowd the office refrigerator with their labeled yogurts. that rare comedy that feels blisteringly urgent.' (TIME) Winner of the Hemingway Foundation / PEN Award, this debut novel is 'as funny as The Office, as sad as an abandoned stapler.

Joshua ferris then we came to the end