The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise Paperback by Georges Perec

Product Details

• Publisher: Verso (2025-06-24)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 96 pages
• ISBN-13: 9781844674190
• Item Weight: 73.71 grams
• Dimensions: 17.81 x 11.05 x 0.74 cm

“One of the most singular literary personalities in the world, a writer who resembled absolutely no one else.”
—Italo Calvino

“A satire for the author’s day and oh yes our own on the subtly crushing effects of corporate life … [a] delectable and philosophical office farce.”
—Steven Poole, Guardian

The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise—neurotic and pessimistic, yet endearing, comic, and never less than entertaining—is a penetrating vision of the world of office work. As translator David Bellos writes, it shows us what ‘computers, perhaps even those powered today by AI, simply cannot do: make us laugh and make us cry’.

This playful novel originated with a 1968 invitation from IBM, then searching for a writer to explore the use of computers in literature. Georges Perec took up the invite and programmed an early computer to follow the steps an employee of a large corporation would take to submit a successful request for a raise. (Perec himself was such a lowly employee at the time, his prospects of getting a raise as dim as those of the narrator of this tale.) From that algorithmic experiment grew this pioneering and enduring fiction.

About the Author

Georges Perec was one of the most important experimental writers of the twentieth century. His many works include the novels Life: A User’s Manual; W, Or, The Memory of Childhood; and The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise.

David Bellos is the author of a number of award-winning literary biographies and the winner of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize for translation in 2005. He lives in New Jersey and teaches French, Italian, and Comparative literature at Princeton University.