Seasonal Associate

…chillingly effective, not least for its accumulation of details, which seem both aggressively banal and freighted with an excess of symbolic meaning….The ubiquitous linguistic debasement and corporate doublespeak is made strange and new again, the small humiliations and injustices pile up along with their psychological and social consequences.

Geissler’s account of her time at Amazon is more than a workplace exposé. Hovering somewhere between memoir, cultural criticism, and fiction, it’s a compelling meditation on the psychological and physical harm of working for a large corporation in a society driven by neoliberal economic goals.

…Geissler is exploring questions of labor and identity in the twenty-first century and the ways in which work does and does not define us. If this book was simply a chronicle of her time working at Amazon, it would be compelling enough—but the narrative risks she takes pay off, making it so much more.

…a bleak meditation on 21st-century drudgery.

In its broadest sense, it is a meditation on the psychological impact of precarious modern work, of how it can settle inside your bones and hollow out the things that make you human.

I haven’t ever read anything quite like it. The story follows a freelance writer low on cash who takes on a short-term contract at Amazon’s Leipzig warehouse through the winter season. If you’re interested in precarious work, the gig economy and how to find a language that accurately describes the emotional landscape of modern work, then this is for you!

An affecting account of precarious labor and demoralizing drudgery, Seasonal Associate exemplifies the minimum wage memoir we need right now. With a keen sense of plain-spoken perspective, Geissler never sensationalizes, instead opting to recount the tedium in terms of unflinching honesty. An exemplary piece of work.

Chris Kraus is the author of four novels, including I Love Dick and Summer of Hate; two books of art and cultural criticism; and most recently, After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography. She received the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism in 2008, and a Warhol Foundation Art Writing grant in 2011. She lives in Los Angeles.

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