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Weird, But in a Good Way
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Shop nowTemporary
Narrator
Carly Robins
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Length
5 hours 1 minute
Language
English
Bookseller recommendation
“Temporary is a delightful, quirky, zippy romp of a read, like riding in a clown car going 90mph through Oz, but while reading the Cliffs Notes to Das Kapital as narrated by Lorelai Gilmore.”
— Rachel • The Book Table
In Temporary, a young woman’s workplace is the size of the world. She fills increasingly bizarre placements in search of steadiness, connection, and something, at last, to call her own. Whether it’s shining an endless closet of shoes, swabbing the deck of a pirate ship, assisting an assassin, or filling in for the Chairman of the Board, for the mythical Temporary, “there is nothing more personal than doing your job.”
This riveting quest, at once hilarious and profound, will resonate with anyone who has ever done their best at work, even when the work is only temporary.
Hilary Leichter's writing has appeared in n+1, the New Yorker, the Cut, the Southern Review, and elsewhere. She has taught fiction at Columbia University and has been awarded fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Reviews
“Leichter’s funny, absurdist debut cleverly explores a capitalist society taken to a dreamlike extreme…. Her cutting, hilarious critique of the American dream will appeal to fans of Italo Calvino.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A young temp searches for permanence in Leichter’s whimsically surreal fable of late-stage capitalism…. Clever and strange and, in the end, unexpectedly hopeful, less a biting gig-economy satire than a wistful 21st-century myth. A dreamy meditation on how we construct who we are.”
—Kirkus
"[Carly] Robins's inflections evoke the perky perfection of a woman who is making incredible connections between the nature of work and life, all amid the story's magical realism. Robins's narration makes this audiobook a delightful experience worthy of multiple listens."
—AudioFile Magazine