Share <Embed>

Buy New

$14.31

List Price: $16.00
Save: $1.69 (11%)

Only 20 left in stock (more on the way).

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

Turn on 1-Click ordering for this browser

This item ships to France. Want it Friday, Nov. 9? Order within and choose AmazonGlobal Priority Shipping at checkout. Learn more

Deliver to France

Buy Used

$7.46

Deliver to France

Used: Good | Details

Sold by Murfbooks

Fulfilled by Amazon

Turn on 1-Click ordering for this browser

Added to

Unable to add item to List. Please try again.

Have one to sell? Sell on Amazon

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See all 2 images

Personal Days: A Novel Paperback – May 13, 2008

by Ed Park (Author)

40 customer reviews

See all 6 formats and editions Hide other formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$5.84

—

—

Hardcover

"Please retry"

—

Paperback

"Please retry"

$14.31

In an unnamed New York-based company, the employees are getting restless as everything around them unravels. There’s Pru, the former grad student turned spreadsheet drone; Laars, the hysteric whose work anxiety stalks him in his tooth-grinding dreams; and Jack II, who distributes unwanted backrubs–aka “jackrubs”–to his co-workers.

On a Sunday, one of them is called at home. And the Firings begin.
Rich with Orwellian doublespeak, filled with sabotage and romance, this astonishing literary debut is at once a comic delight and a narrative tour de force. It’s a novel for anyone who has ever worked in an office and wondered: “Where does the time go? Where does the life go? And whose banana is in the fridge?”

Praise for PERSONAL DAYS
"Witty and appealing...Anyone who has ever groaned to hear 'impact' used as a verb will cheer as Park skewers the avatars of corporate speak, hellbent on debasing the language....Park has written what one of his characters calls 'a layoff narrative' for our times. As the economy continues its free fall, Park's book may serve as a handy guide for navigating unemployment and uncertainty. Does anyone who isn't a journalist think there can't be two books on the same subject at the same time? We need as many as we can get right now." —The New York Times Book Review

"Never have the minutiae of office life been so lovingly cataloged and collated." —"Three First Novels that Just Might Last," —Time

A "comic and creepy début...Park transforms the banal into the eerie, rendering ominous the familiar request "Does anyone want anything from the outside world?" —The New Yorker

"The modern corporate office is to Ed Park's debut novel Personal Days what World War II was to Joseph Heller's Catch-22—a theater of absurdity and injustice so profound as to defy all reason....Park may be in line to fill the shoes left by Kurt Vonnegut and other satirists par excellence."—Samantha Dunn, Los Angeles Times

"In Personal Days Ed Park has crafted a sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but always adroit novel about office life...Sharp and lovely language." —Newsweek

"A warm and winning fiction debut." — Publishers Weekly

"I laughed until they put me in a mental hospital. But Personal Days is so much more than satire. Underneath Park's masterly portrait of wasted workaday lives is a pulsating heart, and an odd, buoyant hope." — Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan

"The funniest book I've read about the way we work now." –William Poundstone, author of Fortune's Formula

"Ed Park joins Andy Warhol and Don DeLillo as a master of the deadpan vernacular." —Helen DeWitt, author of The Last Samurai

Sponsored products related to this item (What's this?)

Page 1 1Start overPage 1 1

Feedback

Jerreece Jackson

“When a Taker Dreams” is intensely steamy, sensual and suspenseful novel! When lust is a powerful emotion!

Just released

Kindle Edition
$0.99
Feedback

Papeterie Bleu

45

Paperback
$6.99
Feedback

Pretty Simple Press

155

Paperback
$5.62
Feedback

J. A. Jackson

Can a quest to break an ancient curse give two former lovers a second chance? Or will their complicated past doom them forever? The Quest Awaits!

Just released

Kindle Edition
$0.99
Feedback

Jaine Diamond

183

Kindle Edition
$3.99
Feedback

Jaine Diamond

The Dirty books have it all - love, betrayal, angst, humor, friendships, awesome playlists and so much steam they just might melt your Kindle!

19

Just released

Kindle Edition
$6.99
Feedback

T.B. Markinson

If you like fully-formed quirky characters and complicated family dynamics, then you’ll love T.B. Markinson’s heartwarming series.

4

Just released

Kindle Edition
$5.99

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Park's warm and winning fiction debut is narrated by a collective we of youngish Manhattan office grunts who watch in helpless horror as their company keeps shrinking, taking their private world of in-jokes and nicknames along with it. The business itself remains opaque, but who eats lunch with whom, which of the two nearby Starbucks is the good Starbucks, and whose desk knickknacks have the richest iconography become abundantly clear. What starts out feeling like a cutesy set of riffs evolves into such a deft, familiar intimacy that when the next round of layoffs begins in earnest, the reader is just as disconcerted as the characters. As office survivors Lizzie, Jonah, Pru, Crease, Lars and Jason II try to figure out who's next to get the axe, mysterious clues point to a conspiracy that may involve one or more of the survivors. By the time answers arrive, Park—former Voice Literary Supplement editor, a founding editor of the Believer and the creator of the e-zine the New York Ghost—has built the tension masterfully. Echoing elements from Ferris's debut smash, Then We Came to the End, Park may have written the first cubicle cozy. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker

This comic and creepy début novel takes place in a Manhattan office depopulated by "the Firings," where one can "wander vast tracts of lunar workscape before seeing a window." The downsized staff huddle like the crew of a doomed spaceship, picked off one by one by an invisible predator. Crippled by computer crashes (one worker suggests that the machines are "trying to tell us about the limits of the human"), the survivors eddy in a spiritual inertia; when one of them is banished to "Siberia"a lone desk on another floorno one can muster the energy even to reply to her increasingly anguished e-mails, until, one day, she is simply no longer there. Park transforms the banal into the eerie, rendering ominous the familiar request "Does anyone want anything from the outside world?"
Copyright ©2008Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker

See all Editorial Reviews

Product details

Paperback: 241 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks (May 13, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9780812978575
ISBN-13: 978-0812978575
ASIN: 0812978579
Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.6 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 40 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,176,593 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #12441 in Books > Humor & Entertainment > Humor > Satire
- #13693 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Humor & Satire > Humorous
- #28077 in Books > Romance > Romantic Comedy

Would you like to tell us about a lower price?
If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support?

Be the first video

Your name here

Sponsored products related to this item (What's this?)

Page 1 1Start overPage 1 1

Feedback

George Orwell

6559

Hardcover
$17.06
Feedback

Selraybob

A big-bellied and downhearted 20-something Missouri man experiences a life-changing epiphany in this whimsical fictional memoir.

12

Kindle Edition
$3.99
Feedback

E. M. Foner

Hit 'pause' on endless wars and the apocalypse with the SciFi series about a brighter future that will make you smile.

1034

Kindle Edition
$0.99
Feedback

Brian Orvik

Matt's mom buys him a dog, Lucky, that seems to know which girls are right or wrong for Matt. You'll love this new romantic comedy screenplay.

5

Kindle Edition
$0.99
Feedback

Brian Orvik

Two brothers compete against their jerk cousins in a game of treasure hunt for their grandpa's $300 million inheritance. This is a comedy screenplay.

1

Kindle Edition
$0.99
Feedback

Romy Dutlinger

Matilda attracts trouble, and there is plenty in Africa in 1969. And she is falling for another man, who is trouble personified. As for her husband!

1

Kindle Edition
$2.99
Feedback

Stephie Walls

I was done. Done with men. I really wish there were other options! But I wasn't prepared for finding true love at the end of my gal-pal tryst...

154

Kindle Edition
$2.99
Feedback

Rob Armstrong

This hilarious book chronicles one man’s journey into the world of modern fatherhood—one botched haircut, playground fight and dirty diaper at a time.

61

Kindle Edition
$2.99
Feedback

Jennifer Griffith

Morgan and Josh are desperate for college cash. But are they desperate enough to be legally wedded?

134

Kindle Edition
$3.99
Feedback

Scott Baron

The girl who thought she was Death finds herself surrounded by nutjobs, locked in a mental ward ruled by a humorless doctor with a Napoleon complex.

84

Kindle Edition
$3.99

Try the Kindle edition and experience these great reading features:

See Kindle Edition

40 customer reviews

3.4 out of 5 stars

Review this product

Write a customer review

Showing 1-6 of 40 reviews

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

"Are you sure you want to quit?"

September 26, 2008

Format: Paperback

It's an anomaly when the TV show "The Office" thrives in British and American versions in popular culture, and "9-to-5" survives as a song and a musical, how infrequently we have successful stories that continue the tradition of "Bartleby the Scrivener" as testimonies to soul-crushing clerical jobs. The novel unfolds in three parts: first, told in the first person plural, short vignettes introduce you to the characters and their personalities. This proves the liveliest part, full of snarky humor that Park renders precisely: "We are moderately proud of our youthful haircuts and overpriced rectangular eyeglasses but that's about it." (7)

It's nervously casual, but the menace lingers underneath the banter, gossip, and machinations. The decade may promise casual office wear and work circles, but hierarchies and capitalism still rule. Here's one sub-section in its entirety: "'The lottery.' We all play the lottery. We buy our tickets individually because we don't want to have to divvy up all that loot in case the numbers come up right." (24)

Joshua Ferris' fittingly titled "And Then We Came to the End" preceded "Personal Days," but this latter novel probably has a better title, which in the closing section warps pleasingly into Joycean style, suiting the confined, pressured, and fading sensibilities of one of a dwindling cadre of office workers in Manhattan. It's a cruel world despite the chatty tone, enriched by Park's mercilessly deadpan excerpts from such so-improbable-they-could-be-real corporate reading as "Yes I Drank the Kool-Aid-- And Went Back for Seconds," "'Three Easy Rules for Impressing the Powers That Be (and Maybe Becoming One Yourself) (A Simpleton's [TM] Guide), by Douglas Salgado and Uri Boris," or "'The Pegasus Plan: How To Get the Job You Want, the Respect You Deserve, and the Employees You Need to Succeed for Life' by D.M.S. Shrapnel, with an introduction by Whittles Langley, CEO of Ptarmigan Group."

As with much of "Bartleby," the city's streets outside earn less attention from Park's dead-on narrators than the cubicles and hallways within a building graced by a gargoyle on its facade. The boom.com long over, the remaining employees await their termination by unseen Californians on a speakerphone; their bosses hover about; the tension pervades the corridors and their psyches. The setting reminds me of the documentary film "Startup.com" about a similar dot.com enterprise's boom and bust. "It wasn't always like this. Before the Firings, a large team worked here, and traces of their residence can still be found. We knew some of them, though not well. We don't really recognize the scattering of remaining employees, who sit hunched with their backs toward us as if awaiting the death blow. Supposedly there are more survivors on the fifth floor, but not too many. These are people whose tasks never intersect with ours, people we never even need to e-mail." (45)

[...]

Comment

I began Personal Days with the expection...

April 19, 2010

Format: Paperback

...(hope!) that it would be an amusing tale of modern life in the office. And it was just that as I was reading Part I of the book. Amusing and interesting enough to hold my interest while not exactly certain who was who among the collected characters whose story was being related by means of the first-person plural point-of-view, an interesting narrative sleight of hand by the author. But when I kept hitting various laugh-out-loud parts I realized I was onto something else.

Part II is rendered by means of a classification system somewhat along the lines of a legal code or contract which I found to be fascinating in its own way, although some readers probably won't care for it. Whatever. The story flows along with or without it. The high point of Part II consists of a piece of found literature--a handwritten notebook containing observations, aphorisms, and other pearls of wisdom gleaned from the collected texts of a number of high priests and practitioners of the business arts. One bombastic absurdity is piled upon another.

Part III of the novel consists of a single Joycean sentence written by one of the principal characters (the period key on his laptop is broken) while trapped in an elevator. This section clarifies and illumines much of what came before. The story then continues to build to a quite surprising climax.

Personal Days is the first novel I've read in quite some time, or ever, that when I was finished I immediately turned back to the first page and began re-reading. It was even more enjoyable the second time through.

Beyond the laughs and the literary pyrotechnics, Park has woven a serious theme into Personal Days with the use of the leitmotif phrase "Where does the time go? Where does the life go?" When someone in the office declares "I can't believe it's almost November!" the person has to be told it already is November and there is in fact only one more week until December. When someone else observes that the current winter isn't so bad compared to last year, it takes his colleagues a moment to realize he's referring to the temperature. Besides, "how many people really remembered what last year's winter was like?" Cold, wet, windy, snow followed by slush. "Winter is winter." And two winters ago? Only the dimmest of collective memories. "Where does the time go? Where does the life go?"

People lose their jobs and are never heard from again in a manner similar to the the dying TB patients of the Berghorf Sanitorium in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain who stop showing up for dinner. But Ed Park is not the lugubrious Teutonic. He is a student of Charles Portis about whom he wrote a fine essay for "The Believer" magazine. His close observations, precise language, and deadpan wit pay homage to the master.

4 people found this helpful

Comment

June 8, 2015

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Stunningly well written workplace tragicomedy. If white-collar neoliberalism had a story, this is it.

2 people found this helpful

Comment

March 22, 2015

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

The book is so funny, the conceit delights and haunts. The book is playful in form while remaining heartfelt. I'll be rereading it soon.

2 people found this helpful

Comment

It's "The Office" in Book Form; Hilarious!

August 31, 2008

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This book was absolutely hilarious and kept me going page-by-page until the end. The characters were great, memorable, and the little inside jokes that developed through the book were endearing.

For anyone who liked "e" or is currently watching The Office or loves Office Space, or into british humour in general, I think you'll really dig this short comedic masterpiece.

4 people found this helpful

Comment

October 29, 2014

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Bought for school.

Comment

Set up an Amazon Giveaway

Personal Days: A Novel

Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more about Amazon Giveaway

This item: Personal Days: A Novel

Set up a giveaway

Pages with related products. See and discover other items: day trade, personal brand

English United States

Conditions of Use
Privacy Notice
Interest-Based Ads
© 1996-2018, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates