Cuốn tiểu thuyết vừa hài...

The Time top ten list looks cool...in Vietnamese:

Một tiểu thuyết về đời sống nhân viên văn phòng lấy bối cảnh của một công ty vô danh đang trên đà thất bại. Personal Days khắc hoạ sự căng thẳng ngày càng tăng trong văn hoá công ty, mọi người sống ngày càng khép kín và nhạy cảm với từng trường hợp sa thải đến mức không còn chịu đựng nỗi lẫn nhau. Cuốn tiểu thuyết vừa hài hước vừa đầy chất hiện thực trong giai đoạn suy thoái kinh tế hiện nay.

Campfire tales

Samantha Hunt—wizardly author of the novels The Seas and The Invention of Everything Else—chooses Personal Days as one of the best books of 2008:

In "Personal Days," Ed Park's dark, dark humor captures the slow death-spiral of a company and the workers still living in its decay. As they are summoned by human resources, the still-employed huddle around their monitors like some post-apocalyptic campfires, writing screenplays, Googling themselves and generally acting far more clever than anyone in charge. Sadly, the book is timely.

—Louisville Courier-Journal

Flexing that giddiness

Edward Champion's Reluctant Habits names Personal Days of the year's top 10 books! (Here's the Bat Segundo interview from earlier this year.)...

...Commonweal includes it in its Christmas Critics roundup—click here to see...

...and...a "former African dictator" gives it a thumbs-up:

Park shows both the cramped spaces and bizarrely profound social investments we make in our co-workers' lives by telling the stories of a dozen mid-level employees of a moribund company, marooned on an increasingly empty floor of a New York high rise. Together, they're bound in anxiety over losing their jobs, excitement at the sudden independence of being fired and terror of doing anything to draw attention to themselves. Oddly, this semi-oblivion engrosses them. The best jokes come from the office. So do the freshest ironic nightmares. It's the most entertaining thing they have, but no one wants to ask too seriously if perhaps that's because it's all they have. —Et Tu, Mr. Destructo?

TIME to get "Personal"!

Personal Days joins books by Roberto Bolaño, Jhumpa Lahiri, Neil Gaiman, and others on Time magazine's list of the Top 10 Fiction Books of 2008!

Read the full article here, and buy copies of PD here.

The Written Nerd calls PD...

"Terrifyingly timely"!

PD clocks in at #5 on the Written Nerd's "Best-Loved Books of 2008."

That's a wrap

The L Magazine recommends Personal Days as a great holiday gift idea.

Brrrr!

The Independent (UK) names Personal Days one of the "50 best winter reads"!

Smartly of-the-moment, this is office life at its best and worst: the "instant folklore" of the internet age ("when you feel a tingling in your fingers it means that someone?s Googling you"); the modernist poetry of an email inbox; the weird of experience of being a boss: "Every night, the chances are that at least one of [your staff] dreams of you."

Gift idea

Personal Days is one of Book Nerd's favorite books of 2008!