Work Sucks

Jimmie works what might be his final day at a London call center, fielding complaints from dissatisfied travelers while navigating the soul-crushing yet hilarious absurdities of a dead-end job.

Jihye silently tolerates office politics and the absurdities of Korean bureaucracy. But all her efforts to endure her superiors and the semi-hostile work environment they create are upended when a new intern, Gyuok Lee, arrives with plans for minor revenge.

A spiky, edgy collection of five sly yet sensitive stories spotlighting clear-eyed and “difficult” women who are navigating their identities as workers and women in contemporary Japan.

Marisa’s high-functioning corporate misery unravels during a company retreat in the Segovia woods, where drugs, guilt and workplace chaos collide, threatening to expose her lies and push her toward a spectacular breakdown.

Ralph loves making world-class corndogs in a struggling Kansas shop. The work is honest, repetitive, and increasingly untenable as bills pile up and the economic gap widens. With wit, compassion, and razor-sharp observation, Dollartorium explores what it means to take pride in labor that society no longer values.

In the suburb of Par Mars stand a pair of identical shopping centers, each with the same harsh, fluorescent lights, climate-controlled environment, and monotonous encounters between employees and shoppers. But the social fabric of Par Mars is coming loose, and a quiet unrest is growing among the mall’s low-wage workers as store managers begin to fall victim to increasingly brutal and spontaneous attacks.

This darkly humorous, sharply observed novel follows a big box store’s poorly paid workers as they take deliveries at 4 a.m., unpack goods, and concoct a plan to get their obnoxious boss promoted in order to create a management position for one of them.

Kyoko Tanihara loves books, but working at the Musashino Bookshop is wearing her down. Instead of championing stories, she spends her days clashing with her manager, Takeru Yamamoto, whose fixation on self-help titles and awkward comments constantly frustrate her. While trying to build a place for herself in publishing, Kyoko receives a book that reframes her complaints and changes how she sees Yamamoto and her work.

Jolene deals with a soul-crushing job by venting about coworkers in white text at the end of her emails to them. After she’s caught, HR makes her take a sensitivity class and restricts her communications…but she’s also accidentally given access to coworkers’ emails and DMs, with surprising results.

Guadalupe Street Co-op is an iconic Austin business with a large, loyal customer base, an antiquated business model that’s barely breaking even, and a disgruntled staff fed up with moody, opaque, and inequitable management. Unfolding over the course of a single week during Texas hurricane season, Work to Do pings between the Co-op’s first year and present day as employee relations, and a unionization bid, reach their fever pitch.