The Employee

Translated, with an introduction, by Matt Seidel / June 2025 / 5.375 x 8, 152 pp. / 978-1-962728-05-8 A nameless employee stands outside the door to an office, hesitating to enter because he is five minutes late. A banal opening—echoing a banal title—that immediately launches into a frenetic narrative that gallops across genres, modes, and galaxies. From an account of his feral childhood with a nymphomaniacal mother, multiple fathers, and a perishing supply of siblings, to his early development of a third arm and a second, jawless head, the employee unspools his subsequent life as cherry-tree prisoner, voraciously unlucky lover, dead man, larva, traveling salesman of inutility, murder suspect, and many other employments, including that of ladder-descending bureaucrat and department-store wrapper. Years pass, return, and reverse through a series of inflicted hellscapes as a tension builds between an untrammeled imagination willing to commit any crime against the laws of time and space,