Then We Came to the End

By Joshua Ferris
(Back Bay Books, Paperback, 9780316016391, 416pp.)

Publication Date: February 2008

Other Editions of This Title: Hardcover, , Paperback

Categories: General

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Joshua Ferris's first novel, Then We Came to the End, won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, and was a National Book Award finalist. It has been translated into 24 languages. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Best New American Voices, New Stories from the South, Prairie Schooner, and The Iowa Review. He lives in New York.

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Although the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist says working in an office is his idea of hell, he admits loving fictional portrayals of the workplace. He talks with Steve Inskeep about some of his favorite literary takes on office life. More at NPR.org

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"What looks at first glance like a sweet-tempered satire of workplace culture is revealed upon closer inspection to be a very serious novel about, well, America. It may even be, in its own modest way, a great American novel."?
-Los Angeles Times

"A masterwork of pitch and tone. . . . Ferris brilliantly captures the fishbowl quality of contemporary office life."
-The New Yorker

"Not too many authors have written the Great American Office Novel. Joseph Heller did it in Something Happened (the one book of his to rival Catch-22). And Nicholson Baker pulled it off in zanily fastidious fashion in The Mezzanine. To their ranks should be added Joshua Ferris, whose THEN WE CAME TO THE END feels like a readymade classic of the genre. . . . A truly affecting novel about work, trust, love, and loneliness."
-Seattle Times