Lara Williams is the author of A Selfie as Big as the Ritz, which was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Edinburgh First Book Award, and the Saboteur Awards, and longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. She is also the author of Supper Club, which won the Guardian “Not the Booker” Prize and was named as a Book of the Year 2019 by TIME and Vogue.
At the Guardian Williams tagged ten top books featuring memorably awful occupations, including:
The Blindfold by Siri HustvedtRead about the other entries on the list.
Iris Vegan is a graduate student who works as research assistant for an older, reclusive man named Mr Morning. She is tasked with cataloguing a series of objects “belonging to a girl who died three years ago” (and, it transpires, was murdered). Iris’s job is to unbox each object (a white glove, a hand mirror), study it, smell it, attempt to understand it, then record herself describing and responding to the object in a neutral whisper. Hustvedt captures the stifling mundanity of repeating a task over and over again under perplexing, stultifying constraints.
--Marshal Zeringue
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