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The Office: A Hardworking History by Gideon Haigh

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July–August 2012, no. 343

The Office: A Hardworking History by Gideon Haigh

Miegunyah Press, $45 pb, 622 pp

The Office: A Hardworking History by Gideon Haigh

by
July–August 2012, no. 343

What two things do the following people have in common: Samuel Pepys, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Émile Zola, Franz Kafka, P.G. Wodehouse, Dorothy L. Sayers, Kurt Vonnegut, and Gabriel García Márquez? Answer: they all did office work, and they all wrote about it. Regardless of Kafka’s conviction that ‘writing and the office cannot be reconciled’, the evidence is that the office breeds writing like nowhere else. From the Restoration period to the present, all the great themes of modernity seem to coalesce around it.

Jane Goodall reviews 'The Office: A Hardworking History' by Gideon Haigh

The Office: A Hardworking History

by Gideon Haigh

Miegunyah Press, $45 pb, 622 pp

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