Read an Extract from The Beautiful Bureaucrat

Read an Extract from The Beautiful Bureaurcrat

Helen Phillips is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award, the Italo Calvino Prize and more. Her debut collection And Yet They Were Happy was named a notable book by The Story Prize. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Electric Literature and The New York Times. An assistant professor of creative writing at Brooklyn College, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children.

Author photo © Andy Vernon-Jones

Helen's new novel, The Beautiful Bureaucrat, poignant, surreal and witty by turns, asks questions about marriage, fidelity, birth and death and the nature of work. Josephine takes up an administrative position in a windowless building in a remote part of town. As the days inch by and the files stack up, she feels increasingly anxious in her surroundings - the drone of keyboards echoes eerily down the long halls, her boss has terrible breath and there are cockroaches in the bath of her sublet. When one evening her husband Joseph disappears and then returns, offering no explanation as to his whereabouts, her creeping unease shifts decidedly to dread.

Read the opening pages here.