Jessica Winter. (2016). Break in Case of Emergency: A novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Jessica Winter. 2016. Break in Case of Emergency: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Jessica Winter, Break in Case of Emergency: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2016.

Jessica Winter. Break in Case of Emergency: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2016.

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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Winter, Jessica
   • bioText: JESSICA WINTER is features editor at Slate and the former culture editor of Time. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Bookforum, The Believer, and many other publications. She lives in Brooklyn.
     jessicawinter.net
   • name: Jessica Winter

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Break in Case of Emergency

fullDescription

“A funny and moving commentary on that point in a woman's life when everything seems to come into question." —Camille Perri, The New York Times

"It's the superb insights and penetrating writing that make this book remarkable... An extraordinary debut." —The Guardian
"Enthralling, sharply observed" —Marie Claire
 
"Hilarious... The personal and workplace plots are woven together beautifully. Read, cringe, laugh, relate." —Lenny
 
"In this cutting commentary on workplace toxicity and how its tendrils can strangle relationships, Winter uses humor to illuminate the state of modern work, family, and friendship." —Elle.com
"Sassy, sarcastic and sleek, this is a wonderfully brash appraisal of how we live."—Colum McCann

One of Elle Magazine's 19 Summer Books That Everyone Will Be Talking About

One of Cosmo's Reads for July

One of Refinery29's Two New Books to Read in July by Brilliant Debut Authors
An irreverent and deeply moving comedy about friendship, fertility, and fighting for one’s sanity in a toxic workplace.
Jen has reached her early thirties and has all but abandoned a once-promising painting career when, spurred by the 2008 economic crisis, she takes a poorly defined job at a feminist nonprofit. The foundation’s ostensible aim is to empower women, but staffers spend all their time devising acronyms for imaginary programs, ruthlessly undermining one another, and stroking the ego of their boss, the larger-than-life celebrity philanthropist Leora Infinitas. Jen’s complicity in this passive-aggressive hellscape only intensifies her feelings of inferiority compared to her two best friends—one a wealthy attorney with a picture-perfect family, the other a passionately committed artist—as does Jen’s apparent inability to have a baby, a source of existential panic that begins to affect her marriage and her already precarious status at the office. As Break in Case of Emergency unfolds, a fateful art exhibition, a surreal boondoggle adventure in Belize, and a devastating personal loss conspire to force Jen to reckon with some hard truths about herself and the people she loves most.
Jessica Winter’s ferociously intelligent debut novel is a wry satire of celebrity do-goodism as well as an exploration of the difficulty of navigating friendships as they shift to accommodate marriage and family, and the unspoken tensions that can strain even the strongest bonds.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Camille Perri, The New York Times
   • content: "A funny and moving commentary on that point in a woman's life when everything seems to come into question."
2. • premium: False
   • source: The Guardian
   • content: "It's the superb insights and penetrating writing that make this book remarkable... An extraordinary debut."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Marie Claire
   • content: "Enthralling, sharply observed"
4. • premium: False
   • source: Lenny
   • content: "Hilarious... The personal and workplace plots are woven together beautifully. Read, cringe, laugh, relate."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Bookforum
   • content: "Winter's sharp perceptions and fluent prose are so much fun to experience...Achingly real."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus Reviews
   • content: "Curious, captivating."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly
   • content: "Entertaining and smartly satirical...This is both a biting lampoon of workplace politics and a heartfelt search for meaning in modern life."
8. • premium: False
   • source: The Guardian
   • content: "Break in Case of Emergency is a high-quality tribute to ordinary experience, which makes it an extraordinary debut."
9. • premium: False
   • source: Refinery29
   • content: "Brilliant...wry and unerringly sharp."
10. • premium: False
    • source: Natalie Bakopoulos, The San Francisco Chronicle
    • content: "A complex and intelligent examination of women's lives, privilege and power, and friendship. Winter explores what it means to have a voice, and how and when to use it."
11. • premium: False
    • source: Colum McCann, National Book Award–winning author of Let the Great World Spin
    • content:
      "If you need a New York map of our times, have Jessica Winter become your cartographer. Sassy, sarcastic and sleek, this is a wonderfully brash appraisal of how we live."
12. • premium: False
    • source: Ed Park, author of Personal Days
      
    • content:
      "Jessica Winter has given us not just one of the funniest books of the year, but an entire glorious comic universe that's as addictive as it is immersive. Not a page goes by without a half dozen delights. Half dozen to a dozen. Sometimes more."
13. • premium: False
    • source: Paul La Farge, author of Luminous Airplanes
    • content: "Break in Case of Emergency is compelling, funny, sad, moving, and ultimately uplifting. Winter is one of the best satirists of the workplace I've read in years; she has a deadly ear for the belief-defying hypocrisies of the office and the art world. But she's also a tender portraitist of the bonds of love, family, and friendship, and of the thousand little (and not so little) ways a person can defeat herself in the search for happiness. I couldn't put this book down."
14. • premium: False
    • source: Caroline Zancan, author of Local Girls
      
    • content:
      "Break In Case of Emergency is brimming with sharp, bitingly funny commentary on the absurdities that abound in the world of celebrity philanthropy, and the seeming impossibilities of modern adulthood, but it also gives us smart, lovable characters to guide us through the maze."
15. • premium: False
    • source: that see-saw teetering point between your 20s and 30s, and its specific mix of ignorance you'll be embarrassed by later, and confidence you'll someday wish you could have back. If you're wondering what it's like to live in New York when you're...
    • content: "Jessica Winter nails the moment in your life when you go from "young" to "no longer young"
16. • premium: False
    • source: Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen
    • content:
      "Extremely funny – a satirical masterpiece that is tender and existentially-minded as well. I loved it!"
17. • premium: False
    • source: Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Eligible
    • content:
      "Very smart and juicy and weird and entertaining...it reads like a chick-lit plot written by Jonathan Franzen."
18. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      May 16, 2016
      Winter’s debut novel offers an entertaining and smartly satirical glimpse inside a New York City nonprofit startup. Jen, in her mid-30s and a new hire at the Leora Infinitas Foundation (also known as LIFt), attempts to navigate the office culture of meaningless jargon, comically hollow acronyms, and self-congratulatory meetings about vague project proposals. Jen, who is by nature accommodating and eager to please, becomes conflicted as she realizes that the company is more concerned with appearances than empowering women all over the world, as its mission statement claims. Still, unlike her coworker Daisy, who is hilariously blunt in her mockery of the foundation, Jen is determined to please her superiors and succeed in her position, having given up on her dream of becoming a visual artist in favor of a stable income for the next phase of her life. She and her husband have been trying to conceive for long enough that they’ve devised their own code language for doctors’ visits and fertility tests. But as Jen’s job begins to affect every aspect of her life, she’s forced to reexamine her choices, relationships, and aspirations. This is both a biting lampoon of workplace politics and a heartfelt search for meaning in modern life.

19. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      May 15, 2016
      Work woes and fertility issues, female friendships and marital challenges are among the factors at play in this satirical novel.Some of the details of the day-to-day life of Jen, the overly accommodating protagonist of Winter's debut novel, will sound all too familiar to many young women: the cavalier (not to say cruel) treatment she receives at the company where she works, a vanity charitable foundation that purports to empower women while robbing Jen of her own sense of self; the sweet husband she dearly loves yet wishes was more of an economic provider; the college friends she feels closest to but can't help envying; the struggle to conceive a child--in Jen's terms, a "hypothetical tiny future boarder"; and the squelched yearning for some kind of self-actualization, although Jen and her crew would probably dismiss the very concept as sounding too much like something Leora Infinitas, the TV sitcom star-cum-socialite who heads the nonprofit at which Jen works, would hold a board meeting to discuss. When she's not toiling away at her pointless job--her chief duties are writing memos no one reads; devising acronyms no one likes; and reading the heartfelt, meandering musings of the privileged women Jen and her caustic-yet-caring work pal, Daisy, have dubbed "the Judys"--Jen makes art and is actually a gifted portraitist. Her work evokes the hidden, perhaps happy, perhaps sinister inner lives of her subjects, and over the course of the novel she finally begins to get a handle on her own inner life. While at times the story veers uneasily between the broadly farcical and intimately emotional, it gains momentum as it goes along. At a certain point, Winter's hold on the plot, her characters, and, as a result, her readers becomes surer as it leads to its satisfying conclusion. Half rollicking sendup of celebrity philanthropy and half meaningful meditation on marriage, friendship, family, and adulthood, Winter's curious, captivating novel seems to teeter at times between split purposes but ultimately finds a pleasing balance.

      COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

20. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      June 1, 2016
      Anxiety and frustration are the dominating emotions for Jen, leaving her unsure of herself and the direction of her life. After losing her job, Jen finds herself working for a feminist nonprofit, LIFt, founded by the eccentric celebrity Leora Infinitas. Her coworkers are consumed by brainstorming vague ideas and acronyms for projects rather than developing the programs at all. Stymied by not quite knowing what her job entails, Jen is left drafting pointless memos and planning projects that most often never come to fruition. This confusing inefficiency in her workplace is coupled with her feelings of inadequacy and disappointment in aspects of her life outside of work, such as her struggles with getting pregnant and her reliance on amphetamines. Her relationships with her husband and two best friends are shaken and tested by her insecurities. Winter weaves a story of the ridiculous (and the serious) people and events that can be found as we reach a turning point in our adult lives. Readers who like workplace satire will enjoy this debut from Winter (features editor at Slate).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

21. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      May 15, 2016
      

      Jen, an aspiring young artist living with husband Jim in a non-hip part of Brooklyn, has just been laid off. In desperation, she takes an ill-defined job at the Leora Infinitas Foundation (LIFt). The brainchild of self-made celebrity entrepreneur Leora Infinitas, this nebulous enterprise with an all-female staff purports to help empower poor women around the world. But Leora has an amazing way of turning every proposed project to benefit the downtrodden into a brazen exercise in her own self-promotion. Jen finds herself in the most toxic New York workplace environment since The Devil Wears Prada, all the while dealing with worrying problems at home and misunderstandings with longtime friends. Readers will long for Jen to stand up for herself, and finally she does, in a very satisfying conclusion. VERDICT This witty and sophisticated debut is a wonderfully snarky satire on the world of celebrity do-gooders. It is also the sympathetic story of a deserving young woman who finally gets what she wants. Happy endings for all, except maybe those phony LIFt folks. [See Prepub Alert, 1/11/16.]--Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA

      Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

22. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      February 1, 2016
      

      Nabbing a job at a nonprofit feminist start-up helmed by celebrity actress Leora Infinitis should be Jen's dream come true, but instead it's a nightmare. Fellow staffers undercut one another while stroking Leora's considerable ego, with little productive work getting done. From the features editor at Slate.

      Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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“A funny and moving commentary on that point in a woman's life when everything seems to come into question." —Camille Perri, The New York Times

"It's the superb insights and penetrating writing that make this book remarkable... An extraordinary debut." —The Guardian
"Enthralling, sharply observed" —Marie Claire
 
"Hilarious... The personal and workplace plots are woven together beautifully. Read, cringe, laugh, relate." —Lenny
 
"In this cutting commentary on workplace toxicity and how its tendrils can strangle relationships, Winter uses humor to illuminate the state of modern work, family, and friendship." —Elle.com
"Sassy, sarcastic and sleek, this is a wonderfully brash appraisal of how we live."—Colum McCann

One of Elle Magazine's 19 Summer Books That Everyone Will Be Talking About

One of Cosmo's Reads for...

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