The Beautiful Bureaucrat

Publisher Marketing: A young wife's new job pits her against the unfeeling machinations of the universe in this dazzling first novel Ursula K. Le Guin hails as "funny, sad, scary, beautiful. I love it." In a windowless building in a remote part of town, the newly employed Josephine inputs an endless string of numbers into something known only as The Database. After a long period of joblessness, she's not inclined to question her fortune, but as the days inch by and the files stack up, Josephine feels increasingly anxious in her surroundings the office's scarred, pinkish walls take on a living quality, the drone of keyboards echo eerily down the long halls. When one evening her husband, Joseph, disappears and then returns, offering no explanation as to his whereabouts, her creeping unease shifts decidedly to dread. As other strange events build to a crescendo, the haunting truth about Josephine's work begins to take shape in her mind, even as something powerful is gathering its own form within her. She realizes that in order to save those she holds most dear, she must penetrate an institution whose tentacles seem to extend to every corner of the city and beyond. Both chilling and poignant, "The Beautiful Bureaucrat" is a novel of rare restraint and imagination. With it, Helen Phillips enters the company of Murakami, Bender, and Atwood as she twists the world we know and shows it back to us full of meaning and wonder luminous and new." Review Citations: Library Journal 06/01/2015 pg. 95 (EAN 9781627793766, Hardcover) Kirkus Reviews 06/01/2015 (EAN 9781627793766, Hardcover) - *Starred Review Publishers Weekly 06/01/2015 (EAN 9781627793766, Hardcover) Kirkus Reviews 05/15/2015 pg. 18 (EAN 9781627793766, Hardcover) - *Starred Review Booklist 07/01/2015 pg. 27 (EAN 9781627793766, Hardcover) New York Times Book Review 08/09/2015 pg. 12 (EAN 9781627793766, Hardcover) New York Times Book Review 08/16/2015 pg. 26 (EAN 9781627793766, Hardcover) Shelf Awareness 08/25/2015 (EAN 9781627793766, Hardcover) Contributor Bio:  Phillips, Helen Helen Phillips is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award and the Italo Calvino Prize, among others. Her collection, "And Yet They Were Happy", was also a finalist for the McLaughlin-Esstman-Stearns Prize, and her work has been featured on NPR's Selected Shorts and appeared in "Tin House", " Electric Literature", "Slice", "BOMB", "Mississippi Review", and "PEN America". She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Brooklyn College and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children.