· Genre ·

Books About Having a Job

Ten books about work — the shift, the commute, the boss, the thing you do for money. Nine come from independent presses that print a few thousand copies at a time (Coffee House, Biblioasis, Two Lines, New Directions, Soft Skull, The New Press) and one from a university press. Six are translated: from Japanese, Danish, German, Spanish and Québécois French. Almost nobody in these books likes their job, which turns out to be the most companionable subject in fiction.

10 booksAugust 2026

01
Temporary
Hilary Leichter
Coffee House Press in Minneapolis is a non-profit that has spent fifty years publishing the strange end of American fiction. Leichter takes the logic of gig work absolutely literally and never once blinks.
02
The Factory
Hiroko Oyamada
New Directions, independent since 1936; translated from the Japanese by David Boyd. Oyamada wrote it out of her own stint as a temp at a car manufacturer's subsidiary, and the detail gives it away.
03
The Dishwasher
Stéphane Larue
Biblioasis is a bookshop-turned-publisher in Windsor, Ontario; Pablo Strauss translated it from the Québécois French. It won the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and still almost nobody outside Canada has read it.
04
Work Pray Code
Carolyn Chen
Princeton University Press, and it reads like reportage rather than a monograph — Chen sat through the corporate mindfulness sessions and quotes them at length.
05
Working
Studs Terkel
The New Press is the non-profit André Schiffrin founded after leaving Pantheon; keeping Terkel's oral histories in print is one of the reasons it exists. Read three interviews, not thirty, and put it down.
06
The Weak Spot
Lucie Elven
Soft Skull Press, independent since 1992 and still the right home for a book this odd. Elven's first novel, and it barely registered when it came out.
07
The Employees
Olga Ravn
Shortlisted for the International Booker; translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken. It began life as a text commissioned to accompany a sculpture exhibition, which is why it resembles nothing else on this list.
08
A Working Woman
Elvira Navarro
Two Lines Press is the publishing arm of San Francisco's Center for the Art of Translation; Christina MacSweeney translated it from the Spanish. Navarro was named one of Granta's Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists and is still barely read in English.
09
Old Rendering Plant
Wolfgang Hilbig
Two Lines Press, translated from the German by Isabel Fargo Cole, who won the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for it. Hilbig worked as a stoker and wrote at night, and the sentences move like something coming up out of the ground.
10
Jakob von Gunten
Robert Walser
NYRB Classics keeps Walser in print; Christopher Middleton's translation from the German is the one to read. Kafka was a devoted reader of Walser, and this is the novel his own work most resembles.