Harris Atria Books, 368 pp., $27.00
Despite the proliferation of novels about the office, about working life, and about how much of ourselves we give to our jobs, only a handful of these texts have engaged substantially with the experiences of people who aren’t white. In Ling Ma’s lucid, postapocalyptic debut,
Severance, there is Candace Chen, who keeps showing up to work even as the world is ravaged by a catastrophic unknown virus and her colleagues die off. In Mateo Askaripour’s satirical novel
Black Buck, there’s Darren Vender, a Black barista who undergoes a radical transformation when he lands at job at a start-up. Both of these novels as well as the comically lascivious early scenes from Raven Leilani’s recent novel,