Ravn asks us to envision a future in which the machines, rather than the humans that create and maintain them, lead the workers’ revolution.

Lauren Nelson, LARB
Lærke Posselt

Olga Ravn

Olga Ravn (born 1986) is a Danish novelist and poet. Her debut poetry collection Jeg æder mig selv som lyng: pigesind (I Devour Myself Like Heather) appeared to critical acclaim in 2012. Alongside Johanne Lykke Holm she ran the feminist performance group and writing school Hekseskolen from 2015 to 2019. In collaboration with Danish publisher Gyldendal she edited a selection of Tove Ditlevsen’s texts and books that relaunched Ditlevsen readership worldwide. Her novel The Employees was on the shortlist for the Booker Prize in 2021.

cover image of the book My Work

My Work

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2023: TIME, LIT HUB, THE MILLIONS

After giving birth, Anna is utterly lost. She and her family move to the unfamiliar, snowy city of Stockholm. Anxiety threatens to completely engulf the new mother, who obsessively devours online news and compulsively buys clothes she can’t afford. To avoid sinking deeper into her depression, Anna forces herself to read and write.

My Work is a novel about the unique and fundamental experience of giving birth, mixing different literary forms—fiction, essay, poetry, memoir, and letters—to explore the relationship between motherhood, work, individuality, and literature.

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cover image of the book The Employees

The Employees

by Olga Ravn

Translated by Martin Aitken

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, The Employees reshuffles a sci-fi voyage into a riotously original existential nightmare. Aboard the interstellar Six Thousand Ship, the human and humanoid crew members complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew becomes deeply attached to them, even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids. In chilling, crackling, and exhilarating prose, The Employees probes into what makes us human, while delivering a hilariously stinging critique of life governed by the logic of productivity.

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Ravn asks us to envision a future in which the machines, rather than the humans that create and maintain them, lead the workers’ revolution.

Lauren Nelson, LARB

The Employees is a short book, but it contains multitudes. Ravn’s open love, pity, and compassion for her strange yet familiar creations is poetry.

John Crowley, The Boston Review

Few stories today are as sublimely strange and their own thing as Olga Ravn’s The Employees. This disorienting, mind-bending expanse recalls as much the poetry of Aase Berg as the workplace fiction of Thomas Ligotti. Something marvelously sui generis for the jaded.

Jeff VanderMeer

Transporting and ephemeral—an unforgettable novel about the psychic costs of labor under capitalism. Dreamlike and sensual, The Employees shouldn’t be missed.

Esquire

God died, and soon the Earth will too, but in this Danish dystopian novel told in vignettes from laborers floating on a spaceship in the 22nd century, work remains.

Jacob Rosenberg, Mother Jones

The most striking aspect of this weird, beautiful, and occasionally disgusting novel is not, as its subtitle implies, its portrayal of working life on the spaceship….What The Employees captures best is humanity’s ambivalence about life itself, its sticky messes and unappealing functions, the goo that connects us to everything that crawls and mindlessly self-propagates, not to mention that obliterating payoff at the end of it all.

Laura Miller, The New York Review of Books

In its imaginative world, the utopian dream of surveillance capitalism has finally come to fruition. Aboard the Six Thousand Ship, where Ravn’s protagonists live, activity and language are carefully shaped around work…Ravn creates a world that is complementary to our own and yet far more menacing.

Jessica Loudis, The Nation

Wry, melancholy, disquieting—The Employees is an intriguing specimen when it comes to workplace narratives. The generic title begs for the text to be read as broadly representative, yet the book resists the neatness that more blatant metaphors might provide. There are, notably, no cartoonishly evil corporate overlords, for example. The company itself is nameless, faceless.

Laura Adamczyk, The AV Club

Olga Ravn’s The Employees unpacks like a miraculous gift, alive with changes. Peeling off the first wrap, things look eerie, then at the next mundane, and while the crackle might sound like laughter, it also shivers with terror or poignancy. Short as the novel is, some chapters just a few lines, it’s intense, sumptuous, and utterly distinctive.

John Domini, The Brooklyn Rail

This is more than a clever reframing of sci-fi tropes, although it’s that, too; the employees’ voices themselves, some of them desperate, some of them meditative, form a touching, alienated chorus, narrating a tragedy that for many will ring eerily true.

Vulture
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