Helen DeWitt. (2011). Lightning Rods. Unabridged Dreamscape Media.

Helen DeWitt. 2011. Lightning Rods. Dreamscape Media.

Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods. Dreamscape Media, 2011.

Helen DeWitt. Lightning Rods. Unabridged Dreamscape Media, 2011.

OverDrive Product Record

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   • fileAs: DeWitt, Helen
   • bioText: Helen DeWitt is best known for her acclaimed debut novel, The Last Samurai. She held a variety of jobs while struggling to finish a book, including a dictionary text tagger, a copytaker, Dunkin' Donuts employee, and working in a laundry service. During this time she reportedly attempted to finish many novels, before finally completing The Last Samurai, her 50th manuscript, in 1998. She has since written several other novels. She lives in Berlin.
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2011-10-25T00:00:00-04:00

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title

Lightning Rods

fullDescription

All I want is to be a success. That's all I ask.' Joe fails to sell a single set of the Encyclopedia Britannica in six months. Then he fails to sell a single Electrolux and must eat hundreds of pieces of homemade pie, served up by his would-be customers who feel so sorry for him. Holed up in his trailer, Joe finds an outlet his for frustrations in a series of ingenious sexual fantasies, and at last strikes gold. His brain storm, Lightning Rods, Inc., will take Joe to the very top - and to the very heart of corporate insanity - with an outrageous solution to the spectre of sexual harassment in the modern office.

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1. • premium: True
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   • content: A failed encyclopedia and vacuum-cleaner salesman named Joe hits upon a unique moneymaking scheme. His company, Lightning Rods, Inc., offers a form of corporate prostitution: providing female temp workers who are available to relieve male workers' sexual urges during the workday. Dushko Petrovich narrates in an unrelieved monotone that reflects Joe's early depression at his inability to succeed in business, no matter how hard he tries. However, Petrovich's lackluster performance fails to capture the vicious humor or the spirit of Helen DeWitt's prose. The novel is artful without artifice, unabashedly blunt in all matters sexual, and scathing in its satirical attack on sexual harassment in the workplace. While LIGHTNING RODS isn't for all listeners, it deserves a stronger narration. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine
2. • premium: True
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   • content:

     August 22, 2011
     A vacuum-cleaner salesman hits on a tasteless business plan to allow working men a sexual release at the office in this perversely surreal second novel by Dewitt (The Last Samurai). Joe doesn’t have what it takes to sell Electrolux in Eureka, Fla., but inspiration strikes in the form of a sexual fantasy involving bottomless women viewed through a hole in a wall. Since Joe believes that human nature can’t be contained, even in an office, he establishes a startup that offers to establish a monetized glory hole in any office, wherein a secretarial pool of “lightning rods” have anonymous sex through the wall of an office’s disabled bathroom. Lightning rods are carefully selected, well paid, protected from discovery and abuse; their services offer a useful “release for any pent-up physical needs,” boost performance, and suppress absenteeism, and allow Joe to sidestep issues of sexual harassment. Joe secures several top-drawer morally expedient and aspirational “gals” like Lucille, later a successful litigation lawyer, and future Supreme Court Justice Renee, and finds his innovative employment agency taking off in a big way. Dewitt’s parody of the corporate model is so resolutely poker-faced and mirthless that it simply feels deadly.

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1. • value: Fiction
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publishDateText

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shortDescription

All I want is to be a success. That's all I ask.' Joe fails to sell a single set of the Encyclopedia Britannica in six months. Then he fails to sell a single Electrolux and must eat hundreds of pieces of homemade pie, served up by his would-be customers who feel so sorry for him. Holed up in his trailer, Joe finds an outlet his for frustrations in a series of ingenious sexual fantasies, and at last strikes gold. His brain storm, Lightning Rods, Inc., will take Joe to the very top - and to the very heart of corporate insanity - with an outrageous solution to the spectre of sexual harassment in the modern office.

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