The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise

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.