short film, "A Timeless Call," honoring America's military veterans, that was directed by Steven Spielberg. She lives in Greenwich Village.
Graham's new novel is Where You Once Belonged.
At Lit Hub she tagged seven top novels on the workplace, including:
Christian Jungersen, The ExceptionRead about the other entries on the list.
Scandinavians are known for their skill with the high-minded thriller and The Exception, by Christian Jungersen, is no exception. In this novel, four women work at the fictional Danish Center for Information on Genocide. Their mission is critical and noble, but the workaday aspect of their days is brought to life in all its deliciously petty, relatable glory.
There’s a door in the office that separates one woman from the other three. It can’t be left open because one of the three woman is worried about drafts. The one on her own, who’s newest to the group, feels left out and later, bullied, causing her to spiral: “As she types, she realizes that she’s losing control. I shouldn’t be feeling like this, she thinks. They’re turning me into a different Anne-Lise…She imagines each tap on the keyboard as if it were a knife plunging into Malene’s body. Or Iben’s.”
The women’s work output is also highlighted, with the inclusion of passages written by the characters that explore the twentieth century’s most notorious real-world atrocities. This allows Jungersen to meditate on the nature of evil by juxtaposing how it functions on a grand-scale (genocide) with how it plays out on the mundane level of office politics.
The distance between the two is called into question after some of the women receive threatening emails, prompting colleagues to wonder whether they come from a war criminal they’ve profiled or the person in the next cubicle.
Anyone who’s ever had their yogurt swiped from the office fridge for the umpteenth time or overheard a couple of snarky colleagues talking about them from behind the doors of bathroom stalls, and thought of what a good weapon a stapler might make, will surely relate.
--Marshal Zeringue
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