Saturday, July 18, 2020

Eleven novels starring essential workers

Preety Sidhu, an intern at Electric Literature, tagged eleven novels featuring essential workers, including:
The Warehouse by Rob Hart

In this dystopian thriller, the totalitarian regime controlling people’s lives is an Amazon-esque mega-corporation called Cloud, which dominates both the retail and labor markets. After a series of mass murders have shut down all other stores, everyone either works for or is a customer of Cloud. Paxton reluctantly works as a Cloud security guard after his own business was bankrupted by their monopolistic practices while Zinnia works on the warehouse floor, though she is actually a secret operative on a corporate espionage assignment. Their story is interspersed with broadcasts to employees from Cloud’s billionaire founder, who is dying of pancreatic cancer. The book is dedicated to Maria Fernandes, who accidentally suffocated on gas fumes sleeping in her car while working three part time jobs.
Read about the other entries on the list at Electric Lit.

--Marshal Zeringue