Calvin Kasulke. (2021). Several People Are Typing: A Novel (Good Morning America Book Club). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Calvin Kasulke. 2021. Several People Are Typing: A Novel (Good Morning America Book Club). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Calvin Kasulke, Several People Are Typing: A Novel (Good Morning America Book Club). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2021.

Calvin Kasulke. Several People Are Typing: A Novel (Good Morning America Book Club). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2021.

OverDrive Product Record

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/0111-1/{D655B02B-7F2A-4D4F-8EDC-FA8BC81B9035}IMG100.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/0111-1/{D655B02B-7F2A-4D4F-8EDC-FA8BC81B9035}IMG200.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/0111-1/{D655B02B-7F2A-4D4F-8EDC-FA8BC81B9035}IMG150.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/0111-1/{D655B02B-7F2A-4D4F-8EDC-FA8BC81B9035}IMG400.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg

formats

1. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780385547253
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 671445
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
2. • identifiers:
     1. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 671445
     2. • type: ASIN
        • value: B08PY1XTB8
   • name: Kindle Book
   • id: ebook-kindle
3. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780385547253
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 671445
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • id: ebook-overdrive

otherFormatIdentifiers

1. • type: ISBN
   • value: 9780385547222

mediaType

eBook

primaryCreator

• role: Author
• name: Calvin Kasulke

isOwnedByCollections

True

title

Several People Are Typing

dateAdded

2021-08-27T22:38:00Z

contentDetails

1. • href: https://link.overdrive.com?websiteID=141&titleID=5965057
   • type: text/html
   • account:
     • name: Sacramento Public Library (CA)
     • id: 1151

sortTitle

Several People Are Typing A Novel (Good Morning America Book Club)

crossRefId

5965057

subtitle

A Novel (Good Morning America Book Club)

id

D655B02B-7F2A-4D4F-8EDC-FA8BC81B9035

starRating

3.5

OverDrive MetaData

isPublicDomain

False

formats

1. • fileName: SeveralPeopleAreTypi_9780385547253_5965057
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 5626802
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780385547253
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 671445
   • rights:
     1. • type: Copying
        • value: 0
     2. • type: Printing
        • value: 0
     3. • type: Lending
        • value: 0
     4. • type: ReadAloud
        • value: 0
     5. • type: ExpirationRights
        • value: 0
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
   • onSaleDate: 8/31/2021
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=d655b02b-7f2a-4d4f-8edc-fa8bc81b9035&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
2. • fileName: SeveralPeopleAreTypi_5965057
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 0
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 671445
     2. • type: ASIN
        • value: B08PY1XTB8
   • name: Kindle Book
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-kindle
   • onSaleDate: 8/31/2021
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=d655b02b-7f2a-4d4f-8edc-fa8bc81b9035&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
3. • fileName: SeveralPeopleAreTypi_9780385547253_5965057
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 0
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780385547253
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 671445
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-overdrive
   • onSaleDate: 8/31/2021
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=d655b02b-7f2a-4d4f-8edc-fa8bc81b9035&.epub-sample.overdrive.com

keywords

1. • value: literary fiction
2. • value: Computers
3. • value: Humor
4. • value: Business
5. • value: Fiction
6. • value: novels
7. • value: satire
8. • value: Comedy
9. • value: LGBTQ
10. • value: gay books
11. • value: queer
12. • value: gay fiction
13. • value: LGBT
14. • value: Books
15. • value: Social Media
16. • value: fiction books
17. • value: funny books
18. • value: humorous books
19. • value: fathers day
20. • value: good morning america
21. • value: fathers day gifts
22. • value: top books
23. • value: gifts for women
24. • value: lgbt books
25. • value: gifts for dads
26. • value: comedy books
27. • value: funny gifts
28. • value: LGBTQ books
29. • value: gifts for nerds
30. • value: artist gifts
31. • value: books fiction
32. • value: coworker gifts for women
33. • value: birthday gift basket
34. • value: 40th birthday gifts for women
35. • value: pride book
36. • value: fathers day gifts for dad
37. • value: book club recommendations 2021

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Kasulke, Calvin
   • bioText: CALVIN KASULKE is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. A Lambda Literary Fellow, his writing and reporting have been featured in VICE, BuzzFeed, and Electric Literature. This is his first book.
   • name: Calvin Kasulke

imprint

Anchor

publishDate

2021-08-31T00:00:00-04:00

isOwnedByCollections

True

title

Several People Are Typing

fullDescription

A Good Morning America Book Club Pick! • A work-from-home comedy where WFH meets WTF. • "An absurd, hilarious romp through the haunted house of late-stage capitalism." —Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House
 
Told entirely through clever and captivating Slack messages, this irresistible, relatable satire of both virtual work and contemporary life is The Office for a new world.

Gerald, a mid-level employee of a New York–based public relations firm has been uploaded into the company’s internal Slack channels—at least his consciousness has. His colleagues assume it’s an elaborate gag to exploit the new work-from home policy, but now that Gerald’s productivity is through the roof, his bosses are only too happy to let him work from ... wherever he says he is.
 
Faced with the looming abyss of a disembodied life online, Gerald enlists his co-worker Pradeep to help him escape, and to find out what happened to his body. But the longer Gerald stays in the void, the more alluring and absurd his reality becomes. Meanwhile, Gerald’s colleagues have PR catastrophes of their own to handle in the real world. Their biggest client, a high-end dog food company, is in the midst of recalling a bad batch of food that’s allegedly poisoning Pomeranians nationwide. And their CEO suspects someone is sabotaging his office furniture. And if Gerald gets to work from home all the time, why can’t everyone? Is true love possible between two people, when one is just a line of text in an app? And what in the hell does the :dusty-stick: emoji mean?
 
In a time when office paranoia and politics have followed us home, Calvin Kasulke is here to capture the surprising, absurd, and fully-relatable factors attacking our collective sanity ... and give us hope that we can still find a human connection.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: -Booklist, *starred review*
     
     “An existential romp with a wicked sense of humor, Calvin Kasulke’s debut novel is a Greek chorus of modern strife, a workplace of woebegone souls. It asks the important questions,...
   • content: "Gloriously inventive. . .Reminiscent of the perfectly realized drudgery of Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End (2006) and the gothic happenings of David Foster Wallace's The Pale King (2011), this is a workplace comedy that brilliantly captures the era of remote work. . .A poignant depiction of the always-on nature of the contemporary workplace. Kasulke's ear for dialogue is remarkable as he truly captures the injokes, asides, and odd language of Slack communication. Funny, relatable, and incredibly timely, this is a hugely entertaining debut."
2. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     July 5, 2021
     Kasulke’s ambitious if underwhelming debut, a fantastical workplace comedy, unfolds via Slack messages sent by employees of a New York City PR firm. Gerald works from home, trapped indefinitely “within the confines of .” Other colleagues also find opportunities to “wfh,” citing a blizzard, or kids, but one of them, Tripp, continues going into the office, where he meets Beverly, a new team member, and the two begin a secret romance. Kasulke does a good job pulling together the signifiers of office culture—the team trade pet pics and carry on inside jokes with an emoji named “dusty stick”—and they work on a campaign for a dog food company that’s in crisis mode over its product allegedly containing poison. But none of these or the other internal mini dramas—such as the incessant “howling” Lydia hears or Gerald’s unease-turned-existential crisis—are particularly engaging or inspiring, and things take a series of odd turns after the Slackbot AI takes over Gerald’s body with his mind still stuck in the digital realm. However clever the setup is, the satire lacks bite and feels not unlike listening to a friend complain about their job. For a book about Slack, it’s largely that. Agent: Kent Wolf, Neon Literary.

3. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     July 1, 2021
     The petty trials and supernatural tribulations of a public relations firm are explored through its Slack conversations in this debut novel. Gerald, a mediocre employee of an unnamed PR firm, is stuck inside his company's Slack channel. He doesn't know how his consciousness became trapped inside the business communication app, and he struggles to explain to his colleagues how he's "just kinda, in here," which he describes as "pretty existentially terrifying."Gerald's co-workers barely register his predicament, however; they believe he's merely engaging in an elaborate bit to take advantage of the firm's new work-from-home policy. Meanwhile, Gerald frantically solicits help from Slackbot, the app's troubleshooting AI, who initially only responds with preprogrammed messages like, "I can help by answering simple questions about how Slack works. I'm just a bot, though!" Things get interesting when Gerald convinces his co-worker Pradeep to check on his absent body, and even more so when Slackbot discovers how to "help" Gerald. Kasulke adopts the epistolary format by restricting the action to Slack, composing his novel out of message threads titled by nickname ("#nyc-office") or the list of participants ("Nikki, Pradeep, Louis C"). Most of the conversations read incredibly quickly, even before the characters are sufficiently differentiated by typing style. Kasulke uses the line breaks and repetition of digital communication to stitch poetry out of textspeak, business lingo, adaptive chatbot phrases, and emojis--the latter represented by frustratingly clunky colon-bracketed text (": thumbsup: "). Subplots about a PR catastrophe at a dog food company, an office hookup, and an employee haunted by mysterious "howling" offer varyingly interesting sendups of business life. As Gerald dissociates further from reality in favor of endless cyberspace, he laments: "We're not made to absorb this much human information at once." A compulsively readable satire of modern corporate culture.

     COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from August 1, 2021
     In this gloriously inventive debut, Kasulke has constructed a funny, tender, and compelling novel that consists entirely of messages on the workplace app Slack. At a New York public-relations firm, one middling employee, Gerald, has had his consciousness uploaded into Slack, and his kindly coworker Pradeep tends to Gerald's bodily needs. As Gerald's productivity improves, no one cares that he seems to be permanently working from home, and many are convinced he's committed to a long-running "bit." Indeed, strange, unexplainable, gothic events keep happening, and, as is a constant in the digital space, no one is quite sure what is real and what is not. Reminiscent of the perfectly realized drudgery of Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End (2006) and the gothic happenings of David Foster Wallace's The Pale King (2011), this is a workplace comedy that brilliantly captures the era of remote work. Like Matthew Dicks' Twenty-one Truths about Love (2019)--which consists solely of lists--Kasulke turns what sounds like a gimmicky premise, and a limiting one at that, into a poignant depiction of the always-on nature of the contemporary workplace. Kasulke's ear for dialogue is remarkable as he truly captures the in-jokes, asides, and odd language of Slack communication. Funny, relatable, and incredibly timely, this is a hugely entertaining read.

     COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     August 27, 2021
     

     DEBUT Books about being Extremely Online have been carving out a slice of the literary zeitgeist in recent years; right on time to the party is Lambda Literary Fellow Kasulke's debut, told entirely through Slack conversations, emojis and all. Titled after a meme that reflects the calm before a storm--a self-explanatory metaphor in an increasingly connected and immediate world--this work concerns the Kafkaesque existential crisis of Gerald, a mid-level employee at a PR firm who suddenly finds his consciousness and corporeal form inexplicably disconnected; relegated to a virtual existence, Gerald has no idea if his body is even still alive. Light topicality follows this high-concept premise, including commentary on late capitalism's internet-aided work/life imbalance and the fiction of modern communication, but it's Kasulke's execution rather than his ideas that recommends this work. The author masters mood, inflecting his comedic core with bits of surreal horror, and demonstrates a keen ear for lingo, expressly humorous without ever forsaking authenticity. He likewise proves deft at depicting the particular rhythms of group chats, with all communication here existing within a haze of disruption. Admittedly, this comes at the expense of any real characterization, which plays third fiddle to the novel's formal playfulness and puckish conceit, but if the novel never rises above a trifle, it's at least a delicious one. VERDICT Existing in the slipstream of humanity's and technology's mutual march forward, this is a welcome if lightweight oddity that cuttingly observes the horror and humor of the modern condition.--Luke Gorham, Galesburg P.L., IL

     Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity

1474

links

• self:
  • href: https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/v1L1BWwAAAA2I/products/d655b02b-7f2a-4d4f-8edc-fa8bc81b9035/metadata
  • type: application/vnd.overdrive.api+json

id

d655b02b-7f2a-4d4f-8edc-fa8bc81b9035

starRating

3.5

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/0111-1/{D655B02B-7F2A-4D4F-8EDC-FA8BC81B9035}IMG100.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/0111-1/{D655B02B-7F2A-4D4F-8EDC-FA8BC81B9035}IMG200.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/0111-1/{D655B02B-7F2A-4D4F-8EDC-FA8BC81B9035}IMG150.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/0111-1/{D655B02B-7F2A-4D4F-8EDC-FA8BC81B9035}IMG400.JPG
  • type: image/jpeg

isPublicPerformanceAllowed

False

languages

1. • code: en
   • name: English

subjects

1. • value: Fiction
2. • value: Literature
3. • value: Humor (Fiction)

publishDateText

08/31/2021

otherFormatIdentifiers

1. • type: ISBN
   • value: 9780385547222

mediaType

eBook

shortDescription

A Good Morning America Book Club Pick! • A work-from-home comedy where WFH meets WTF. • "An absurd, hilarious romp through the haunted house of late-stage capitalism." —Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House
 
Told entirely through clever and captivating Slack messages, this irresistible, relatable satire of both virtual work and contemporary life is The Office for a new world.

Gerald, a mid-level employee of a New York–based public relations firm has been uploaded into the company’s internal Slack channels—at least his consciousness has. His colleagues assume it’s an elaborate gag to exploit the new work-from home policy, but now that Gerald’s productivity is through the roof, his bosses are only too happy to let him work from ... wherever he says he is.
 
Faced with the looming abyss of a disembodied life online, Gerald enlists his...

sortTitle

Several People Are Typing A Novel (Good Morning America Book Club)

crossRefId

5965057

subtitle

A Novel (Good Morning America Book Club)

publisher

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

bisacCodes

1. • code: FIC016000
   • description: Fiction / Humorous / General
2. • code: FIC019000
   • description: Fiction / Literary
3. • code: FIC052000
   • description: Fiction / Satire