Product Description

No one knows us quite the same way as the men and women who sit beside us in department meetings and crowd the office refrigerator with their labeled yogurts.  Every office is a family of sorts, and the ad agency Joshua Ferris brilliantly depicts in his debut novel is family at its strangest and best, coping with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks.
     With a demon's eye for the details that make life worth noticing, Joshua Ferris tells a true and funny story about survival in life's strangest environment--the one we pretend is normal five days a week.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #76431 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-26
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 8.25" h x 1.14" w x 5.50" l, .85 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In this wildly funny debut from former ad man Ferris, a group of copywriters and designers at a Chicago ad agency face layoffs at the end of the '90s boom. Indignation rises over the rightful owner of a particularly coveted chair ("We felt deceived"). Gonzo e-mailer Tom Mota quotes Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the midst of his tirades, desperately trying to retain a shred of integrity at a job that requires a ruthless attention to what will make people buy things. Jealousy toward the aloof and "inscrutable" middle manager Joe Pope spins out of control. Copywriter Chris Yop secretly returns to the office after he's laid off to prove his worth. Rumors that supervisor Lynn Mason has breast cancer inspire blood lust, remorse, compassion. Ferris has the downward-spiraling office down cold, and his use of the narrative "we" brilliantly conveys the collective fear, pettiness, idiocy and also humanity of high-level office drones as anxiety rises to a fever pitch. Only once does Ferris shift from the first person plural (for an extended fugue on Lynn's realization that she may be ill), and the perspective feels natural throughout. At once delightfully freakish and entirely credible, Ferris's cast makes a real impression. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From AudioFile
Fans of "The Office"--American or British--will enjoy Joshua Ferris's take on working life. This debut novel is written from a plural first-person viewpoint, which is a bit odd at first but soon becomes transparent and integral. Ad agency employees struggle to create a humorous breast cancer awareness campaign while dodging the lay-off ax. The characters are recognizable office personalities, and Deanna Hurst's narration gives each character life without going overboard with different voices for dialogue. In other words, like the characters themselves, the voices all sound different and the same, simultaneously. With Hurst playing Ferris's dry, sharp humor perfectly, listeners will be sorry to hear the story come to an end. M.T. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Review
"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 Michael Upchurch )