The Employees

A deeply sensory book, suffused with aroma and alert to tactility... The Employees is not only a disconcertingly quotidian space opera; it's also an audacious satire of corporate language and the late-capitalist workplace, and a winningly abstracted investigation into what it means to be human... This clever, endlessly thought-provoking novel catches something of our recursive search for the nature of consciousness; a question that answers itself, a voice in the darkness, an object moving through space. -- Justine Jordan - Guardian Everything I'm looking for in a novel. I was obsessed from the first page to the last. A strange, beautiful, deeply intelligent and provocative investigation into humanity. The Employees is an alarmingly brilliant work of art -- Max Porter Beautiful, sinister, gripping. A tantalizing puzzle you can never quite solve. All the reviews say that the novel is, ultimately, about what it means to be human. What makes it exceptional, however, is the way it explores the richness and strangeness of being non-human. -- Mark Haddon What might result if Ursula K. Le Guin and Nell Zink had a baby. -- Tank Magazine An achingly beautiful mosaic of fragile characters managing their longing, pain, and alienation. This gorgeous, evocative novel is well worth the effort. -- Publishers Weekly In brief numbered statements delivered by the human and nonhuman crew of the Six Thousand Ship to a shadowy committee, Ravn seeds her narrative with direct and allegorical reflections on transhumanism, disappearing nature, and the ambiguities of being embodied... The novel is by turns queasily exact about what is seen-skin pitted like pomegranate, an object's furrows oozing some nameless balm-and willfully obscure. Ambiguity is everything: I don't know if I'm human anymore. Am I human? Does it say in your files what I am? -- Brian Dillon - 4columns The Employees asks important questions about what makes up human consciousness, and also, critiques corporate language that can make its way into our lives sometimes without us knowing. It's very funny. It's very interesting. I definitely recommend checking this one out. -- Corinne Segal - WNYC A book that strikes a rare balance between SF philosophy and workaday feeling all while whirling through space. -- Kirkus The Employees feels close to Greek mythology. Like the figures of an epic, the workers seem composed of equal parts fate and randomness, automation and rebellion. The actual business of the Six Thousand Ship is nevertheless wholly modern: resource extraction, as employees make occasional excursions to harvest commodities known only as 'objects.' These soon come to derail-delightfully-both the ship's functioning and its crew's philosophizing. -- Zoe Hu - Bookforum [The] manipulation of contrasting tones-from management speak to emotional candor-is as much the handiwork of Ravn as it is Martin Aitken, who translated The Employees from Danish. The term masterful is so oft-used as to become diluted, bordering on cliche, but in the case of Aitken, it applies in its truest sense. Aitken, who has also translated works by Karl Ove Knausgard and the PEN Translation Prize-winning Love by Hanne Orstavik, captures the distinct voices of the countless characters whose recorded statements make up The Employees, and pulls off perhaps the hardest feat of translation-the feeling that the work hasn't been translated at all. -- Sophia Stewart - Tor The Employees is framed as a collection of increasingly bizarre memos filed by the crew of a deep-space vessel, who seem to be infatuated with the strange cargo they picked up from an alien world. As their obsession turns to mania, things start to go wrong in hilarious, grim, spectacular ways. Only 144 pages long and full of white space, The Employees achieves its macabre, chaotic mission at light speed. -- Patrick Rapa - Philadelphia Inquirer The Employees feels close to Greek mythology. Like the figures of an epic, the workers seem composed of equal parts fate and randomness, automation and rebellion. The actual business of the Six Thousand Ship is nevertheless wholly modern: resource extraction, as employees make occasional excursions to harvest commodities known only as 'objects.' These soon come to derail-delightfully-both the ship's functioning and its crew's philosophizing. -- Zoe Hu - Bookforum [The] manipulation of contrasting tones-from management speak to emotional candor-is as much the handiwork of Ravn as it is Martin Aitken, who translated The Employees from Danish. The term masterful is so oft-used as to become diluted, bordering on cliche, but in the case of Aitken, it applies in its truest sense. Aitken, who has also translated works by Karl Ove Knausgard and the PEN Translation Prize-winning Love by Hanne Orstavik, captures the distinct voices of the countless characters whose recorded statements make up The Employees, and pulls off perhaps the hardest feat of translation-the feeling that the work hasn't been translated at all. -- Sophia Stewart - Tor The Employees is framed as a collection of increasingly bizarre memos filed by the crew of a deep-space vessel, who seem to be infatuated with the strange cargo they picked up from an alien world. As their obsession turns to mania, things start to go wrong in hilarious, grim, spectacular ways. Only 144 pages long and full of white space, The Employees achieves its macabre, chaotic mission at light speed. -- Patrick Rapa - Philadelphia Inquirer The Employees is framed as a collection of increasingly bizarre memos filed by the crew of a deep-space vessel, who seem to be infatuated with the strange cargo they picked up from an alien world. As their obsession turns to mania, things start to go wrong in hilarious, grim, spectacular ways. Only 144 pages long and full of white space, The Employees achieves its macabre, chaotic mission at light speed. -- Patrick Rapa - Philadelphia Inquirer