Wednesday, April 23, 2025

Seven titles that turn the workplace into a nightmare

Sarah Maria Griffin is from Dublin, Ireland. She is the author of the novels Spare & Found Parts and Other Words For Smoke, which won an Irish Book Award in 2019. She writes about video games for The Guardian, and her nonfiction has appeared in The Irish Times, The Winter Papers, and The Stinging Fly, among other places.

Griffin's new novel is Eat the Ones You Love.

At Electric Lit she tagged seven "books about work that ... lean firmly to the side of the gothic." One title on the list:
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

This, to me, is a tender and elegant novel about being at odds with the world, but also, with a tilt, the convenience store could read as a strange prison. These identical spaces, these machines for life, this realm where Keiko, our utterly singular protagonist, can function well—though the rest of the world is difficult. Without the convenience store, Keiko cannot cope. She returns, as though drawn by something unspeakable. Is this not a kind of a ghost story? A story of possession? There is no specter or ghoul at its heart, just the inescapable halogen glow of the conbini.
Read about the other entries on the list at Electric Lit.

Convenience Store Woman is among Eliza Browning's ten novels about resisting productivity culture and Anne Heltzel's seven books about women who refuse to fit in.

--Marshal Zeringue