Temporary

By Hilary Leichter
Coffee House Press, 2020

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Description

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.

Reviews

“A narrative so deliciously allusive and disarmingly literal that this reader kept thinking maximum glee had been attained, only for the glee to somehow grow even more maximal just a few sentences later.” —Helen Oyeyemi

“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.” —Publisher's Weekly, starred review

“Leichter keeps the narrative crisp, swift and sardonic. “Temporary” reads like a comic and mournful “Alice in Wonderland” set in the gig economy, an eerily precise portrait of ourselves in a cracked mirror. As the Red Queen told Alice, seizing her wrist and goading her on for a race: “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”” —Parul Sehgal, New York Times

About The Author

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.

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