Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. This week at The Paris Review, we’re thinking about family bonds, in anticipation of the […]
Slaves of New York movie review (1989) rogerebert.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from rogerebert.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Sat 15 May 2021 04.00 EDT
What has become of the office? Its small, mundane daily rituals, its smells – of over-boiled coffee, synthetic fabrics, other people’s perfume – the low hum of phone conversations and the whirring of the printer. To those of us who are still working from home, it feels like a faraway place, a half-forgotten memory, and to those who have returned it is utterly transformed: masked, distanced, hushed.
It’s a strange time to be appraising the workplace novel. Will things return to how they were before, or will we look back on our time of working long, gruelling hours in the office with relief, or even nostalgia? I wonder if books set in offices will make us wistful about some aspects of pre-pandemic life or if, instead, these narratives will act as a warning against returning to a working culture that felt, to many of us, unreliable and unstable.