Personal Days

by Ed Park

In an unnamed New York-based company, the employees are getting restless as everything around them unravels. There’s Pru, the former grad student turned spreadsheet drone; Laars, the hysteric whose work anxiety stalks him in his tooth-grinding dreams; and Jack II, who distributes unwanted backrubs–aka “jackrubs”–to his co-workers.

On a Sunday, one of them is called at home. And the Firings begin.
Rich with Orwellian doublespeak, filled with sabotage and romance, this astonishing literary debut is at once a comic delight and a narrative tour de force. It’s a novel for anyone who has ever worked in an office and “Where does the time go? Where does the life go? And whose banana is in the fridge?”

Praise for PERSONAL DAYS
"Witty and appealing...Anyone who has ever groaned to hear 'impact' used as a verb will cheer as Park skewers the avatars of corporate speak, hellbent on debasing the language....Park has written what one of his characters calls 'a layoff narrative' for our times. As the economy continues its free fall, Park's book may serve as a handy guide for navigating unemployment and uncertainty. Does anyone who isn't a journalist think there can't be two books on the same subject at the same time? We need as many as we can get right now." — The New York Times Book Review

"Never have the minutiae of office life been so lovingly cataloged and collated." —"Three First Novels that Just Might Last," — Time

A "comic and creepy début...Park transforms the banal into the eerie, rendering ominous the familiar request "Does anyone want anything from the outside world?" — The New Yorker

"The modern corporate office is to Ed Park's debut novel Personal Days what World War II was to Joseph Heller's Catch-22 —a theater of absurdity and injustice so profound as to defy all reason....Park may be in line to fill the shoes left by Kurt Vonnegut and other satirists par excellence." —Samantha Dunn, Los Angeles Times

"In Personal Days Ed Park has crafted a sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but always adroit novel about office life...Sharp and lovely language." — Newsweek

"A warm and winning fiction debut." — Publishers Weekly

"I laughed until they put me in a mental hospital. But Personal Days is so much more than satire. Underneath Park's masterly portrait of wasted workaday lives is a pulsating heart, and an odd, buoyant hope." — Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan

"The funniest book I've read about the way we work now." –William Poundstone, author of Fortune's Formula

"Ed Park joins Andy Warhol and Don DeLillo as a master of the deadpan vernacular." —Helen DeWitt, author of The Last Samurai

Genres: Fiction, Humor, Contemporary, Novels, Literary Fiction, Literature, New York

241 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2008

About the author

I'm the author of the forthcoming story collection AN ORAL HISTORY OF ATLANTIS (July 2025)—preorder it now!

My novel SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS (2023) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction and the Asian Pacific American Award for Literature.

My debut novel, PERSONAL DAYS (2008), was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Asian American Literary Award, and the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize.

THREE TENSES, my memoir, will be out next year.

What else? I'm a founding editor of THE BELIEVER, and I've written for The Atlantic, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Bookforum, The Baffler, and many other places. (Check out ed-park.com or https://linktr.ee/edpark for some recent pieces.)

NB, I am *not* the author of THE WORLD OF THE OTTER, by the late nature writer Ed Park, but it's worth picking up if you see a copy (and like otters).

Reviews

[Ed · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book I ever wrote! (Circa 2008!)

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Richard Ellmann in his seminal biography, illustrates how Joyce would perambulate, gleaning phrases and word salads from the hum of the city. Consigning such to scraps of paper in his pocket which he would then masterfully weave into the epic which was Ulysses. The first three quarters of Personal days reveal Ed Park simply aligning the scraps into a perforated guide to office life.

I was prepared to hate this book. It was simply stat padding on my yearly totals.

The final quarter of the novel is a reaping, a summoning of poetry from the boredom of the modern workplace. The dross of half-truths is burned away and the reader remains all the richer .

I can still only offer three stars, though a fourth beckons wordlessly offstage.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

You have to feel a little bit sorry for Ed Park, that his book came out roughly a year after Joshua Ferris's infinitely superior "Then We Came to the End". The similarities are staggering - the milieu and plot of both books are virtually identical -- a Chicago/Manhattan advertising/graphic design office, staffed by assorted twenty- and thirty-something professionals, dealing with successive rounds of layoffs and the resulting paranoia. Not only that, use of a 3rd person plural narrative voice and deadpan gossipy tone throughout much of Park's book make parts of it almost indistinguishable from Ferris's.

The differences, unfortunately, almost all work in Ferris's favor. Park's book suffers from a glaring lack of character development - none of the characters who make up the collective narrative voice are developed to a sufficient degree of individuality to allow the reader to distinguish among them, let alone care about their fate. Ferris managed to rise above this trap and ultimately wrote a book that packed a surprising emotional wallop. It's impossible to feel much for Park's thinly limned characters - and the final stream-of-consciousness soliloquy by Jonah, trapped in the belly of the elevator, addressed as an apology to Prue, just left this reader wondering: "which one was Prue again?".

Park does have a keen ear for the linguistic atrocities of the workplace, and the book has its share of hilariously on-target skewering of management guru platitudes. But ultimately, it all adds up to nothing of interest, since the author fails to provide characters with genuine emotional depth.

The failure of this book makes one realize once again the impressive nature of Joshua Ferris's accomplishment.

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

[Fede La Lettrice · Rating 3 out of 5]

• Romanzo che sembra nato dal desiderio di trasformare le dinamiche da ufficio in una sit-com su carta: e-mail imbarazzanti, gossip da fotocopiatrice, capi strambi e siparietti in ascensore per catturare l'assurdità del mondo lavorativo moderno con un'ironia leggera, un po' farsesca, ma mai davvero tagliente. È un'ironia che strizza l’occhio al lettore con complicità, ma spesso non va oltre il solletico.

• Preferisco l’ironia stratificata e intellettuale di Pynchon, Gaddis o Eco, perciò questo racconto mi è parso un po' superficiale e sicuramente non mi ha fatto ridere. I giochi di parole e le gag ricordano il tono di Nick Hornby, con il suo modo di raccontare la quotidianità con un sorriso bonario, senza affondare davvero il colpo.

• L'umorismo che cerco in un libro, quello che mi illumina e mi diverte, è quello che smonta interi sistemi di pensiero o che maschera una critica sociale feroce per dire, mentre Maledetti colleghi al massimo mi lascia con un mezzo sorriso e un sopracciglio alzato.

• Però, per chi ama ridere senza impegnarsi troppo, questo libro è una pausa caffè perfetta: breve, piacevole e assolutamente non essenziale.

[Eileen]

fiendishly smart office drama turned detective novel. this feels like the obscure uncle of more recent productions like sorry to bother you, severance the book, and severance the tv show. it's got that dystopic quality to it, except all of the strangeness and agitation is entirely endemic to the office – mysterious firings, faulty dictation software, an abandoned fifth floor called siberia, temporal drift, mass amnesia. the first section is deployed in the collective "we," the second report-like, in a series of short clauses and subclauses, and the third a long (and stunning!) email. a little gimmicky on paper, but i think it worked in this context. i read the first half in five minute segments before i went to bed over a span of like two months, usually forgetting everything i'd just consumed almost immediately, but the second i picked up on the train yesterday and finished in one frantic go this morning, and i think something about that made me feel pleasantly synched up to the characters as everything spiraled into oblivion.

[Imogen · Rating 4 out of 5]

My dog is running up to me, pressing a tennis ball into my leg, then running away from me. Over and over, and has been for the last hour or so, since seven AM, so forgive me if this ins't the lucidest review you've ever read. See I live in this long, basement/garage/bedroom, where there's room for a pretty humble game of fetch, and there's nothing that dog likes more than a humble game of fetch. She especially prefers fetch to, like, hanging out and not whining while I sleep, or sleeping too while I sleep.

Anyway, okay, as maybe you know, I love it when a book ends by going completely off the rails into complicated, weird, unlikely conspiracy territory, and this one definitely does that. Which is nice. I'm ambivalent toward the fact that the first third is told in the first person plural, I hated the outline format the second part had (it took me forty pages or so to figure out that, while there are like 'II A ii r's and shit like that, I didn't need to understand where in the outline I was, and that frustration didn't really feel worth the obvious jab at the arbitrary organization of office documents; there's way better stuff in this book than that), and I love LOVE the third part, the sixty or so pages of yelling.

So, yeah. This is not the most life-changing book in the world, and the emptiness/weirdness/ridiculousness of cubicle life isn't really the most groundbreaking topic. But so what, right? Neither is three generations of life in a small Mexican town, or a Dominican-American kid who likes comic books. Or: a young middle-class white woman's work and romantic life in short story snapshots, while we're at it. I'm still not 100% sure how I feel about it (well, I feel four stars about it, apparently), but I enjoyed reading it while I was reading it, which is more than I can say for some books, MICHAEL CHABON AND DAVID FOSTER WALLACE.

[Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best new novels I've read in years. I feel like none of the reviews I've read of it quite describe what it feels like to read it---yes, it's funny, and the word "savage" appears a fair amount, but it's more like, "Oh, someone has finally described what it is like to work now."

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one is for the office workers. It's so relatable, but anyone who doesn't work in an office might read this and think it's too far-fetched, nobody talks or acts like that, no company operates that way. Well they do. Can confirm.

Highly recommended to read this alongside the 1999 movie Office Space.

[minidmichie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Personal Days, by Ed Park, is not like most novels. The novel starts out as a description of working in an office building located in New York and as you continue reading you discover the struggles and strangeness that the workers have to go through. While the struggles continue, the workers start worrying about the recent firings that have been happening. Past workers and new dramas come bursting into the workers lives causing exaggerated fantasies of having a better life outside the office and a constant mystery of what really goes on in their work place and who’s in charge. There is no main character, since it is told in a third person point of view. You meet Sprout, the boss, Pru; Jonah; Laars; Jack II; Lizzie; Jenny; Crease, and Jill, the workers. As well as Maxine, the attractive and hypnotic woman, who works alongside the Sprout and K who works with the Sprout as well, she is never seen but has authority. Later on you meet characters that come in and create drama. All these characters and the way the storyline is written, makes the novel really entertaining.
The storyline is quite humorous and interesting; however, I’ve noticed that the author made references that were unknown to me, most likely because the novel is intended for older audiences. The use of vocabulary was in a way difficult at times, which forced me to have a dictionary so I could understand what was going on throughout the story. Other than my frustration with the vocabulary, I found the separation of chapters quite interesting. The first part was written as diary entries (sort of). The second part was written in an outline form, which I’ve never seen in a novel. The third part of the novel was written as a letter to one character to another and that letter wrapped up everything that was going on; a great ending too.
In all, the novel itself was amusing and interesting. The middle part of the story is confusing and a little boring because of the slow pace but it does come back to catch your interest. You learn a lot from the story if you ever wanted to know how it is to work in an office and how the inner thoughts of your co-workers work. As well as the writing style of the author, it’s really interesting that it becomes inspirational by how different it is to others. I give this book 4 stars out of 5 ,mainly because of how well it was written and the way it went to the point where you never lost all interest, as well as its humorous and twisted ending. I’d recommend this book to anyone who is up for a humorous and shockingly interesting book.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first third of this book is pure genius - painfully accurate for anyone who has ever working in an office.

[Sarah-Tyler Moore · Rating 3 out of 5]

Headline: I, like Jonah, was held hostage by the last (not insignificant) chunk of this book.

Plot Summary: This is a sardonic, dry plot about a group of coworkers in an office. Said office uses fax machines, floppy disks and has an “asthmatic” printer. This is most certainly an office environment pre-2010ish. Dated office accoutrements aside, this was pretty boring. “Boring” is a word I can’t remember the last time I used to describe a book. Many of “The Office” adjacent quips were front loaded in the book sample.

The second portion of the book was written in outline format. It was as enjoyable as reading the most disjointed college course syllabus. You must weed through excessive Roman numeraling to suss out when assignments are due.

I enjoyed the big reveal about Griffin/Graham/Percy. That said, the reveal was buried in an excessively verbose, meandering and excruciatingly long email, written by Jonah to Pru in the dark in a broken elevator.

About that email: there wasn’t a single period. I know this was intentional. It’s a trope. I get it and I hate it.

POV: imagine you’re deciphering a 50 page run-on sentence. I enjoy atypical writing; give me an interesting tangent with a comma or two sprinkled in. This was not interesting. This was torture.

The author is talented and funny even — the Jilliad was hilarious and deserved more attention. I wish he had reined it in at the end.

[Vinay Khosla · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5- hahahahhahaha ok. Nice. Actually LOL at parts of the book so that’s pretty cool. Severance is better tho xx

[Trin · Rating 3 out of 5]

It would be hard at this point, I think, to talk about Personal Days without also talking about Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End, as they’re both novels about office life in failing companies, are both written at least partially in the first person plural, and came out within a year of each other. Then We Came to the End was fortunate enough to have come out first. I feel really bad for Ed Park, getting scooped like that. Both novels are good, though—just in different ways. However, I do think Then We Came to the End is better.

Personal Days is possibly funnier. The first section—the first person plural one—is pretty hilarious. The tone gets darker as the book progresses—it in fact ends with an almost literal Jonah-in-the-belly-of-the-whale section (seriously. A character in named Jonah writes the last section while trapped in an elevator), a stream-of-consciousness Molly Bloom’s soliloquy kind of thing, which I always seem to enjoy even though pastiches of that kind are perhaps becoming overused. (Darn it. I still want the opportunity to do one myself.) However, I felt like we never really get to know the characters to the extent that’s necessary in order for this climax to have the impact it needs—a lot of the female characters, for example, seemed the same to me, to the point that I got confused several times regarding which ones were which, or even how many there were. Even Pru, clearly meant to be the most dynamic, didn’t really stand out to me; I got very little sense of her inner life at all. I think the comparative flatness of the characters is why Personal Days ultimately didn’t move me as much as Then We Came to the End.

The corporate sabotage plot also struck me as convoluted and rather unrealistic in what’s otherwise trying to be a realistic novel; of course the same could—and should—be said about the fake shooting in Then We Came to the End. I guess both authors caved to the pressure a little when it came to trying to maintain a lifelike narrative and still keep things interesting.

I’m glad I read both books, though. If I had to pick just one to recommend to someone who really felt they only had room in their life for one comic office novel, yes, I would pick Ferris’ version. But I’m happy to clear space on my shelf for both, just as there’s room in my DVD cabinet for both the British and the American The Office.

[Kris · Rating 2 out of 5]

I enjoyed parts of this book, but there was a MAJOR issue I had with it. The book is divided into three parts: the first part reads like a regular story, written in 1st person plural - we did this, we saw that, etc.; the second part is written entirely in outline form - I.A.ii.b., etc. - a little annoying, but still fairly easy to follow; but the third part is written as one long, stream-of-consciousness run-on sentence. The premise (to the third part)is that a character is sending an email to another person; he's trapped in an elevator, the screen on his laptop has gone dark, and his period (full-stop) and return buttons don't work, so he's just writing everything as it comes to him, without going back and changing things. Plus he likes to go off on tangents unrelated to the action in the story. This is the kind of thing that, if it had happened toward the beginning of the novel, would have caused me to throw the book over my shoulder (figuratively, librarians! calm down!) and go read something else. But because I was already involved in the whole story, I wanted to find out what happened to everyone, so I had to struggle through to the end. As the character went off on each of his tangents, I kept thinking, "Wait! Where are you going? Come back here and tell me what happened to these guys!"
There were good parts to the story; puns and office romances and office nicknames like "Grime" and "Crease", and management doublespeak lie "There's no I in team", and other funny bits. Parts of the story reminded me of good episodes of "The Office". But the totally unnecessary changes in writing style completely threw me off, and by the end of the book I was just glad it was over.

[Aili · Rating 5 out of 5]

For the record, I am giving this book 5 stars even though I'm pretty mad at it right now... for ending. It was a pretty quick read. I would say perfect for that business trip you're about to go on, but if you get to go on paid business trips you are perhaps not quite in the target audience.

I am a little annoyed that the plot crept up on me -- I was expecting events so mundane they would seem dark/depressing (I've heard And Then We Came to the End is like this, though I haven't read it) -- not actual "dark" plot elements. I kind of wish Ed Park had stuck with the former, though I guess that would have left him with less of a structured novel and more of a genius tone-poem about what the working world is like.

Recommended to anyone who has ever worked in an office. This means you. Go get a copy right now. I will lend you mine but you have to give it back so I can lend it to somebody else after you.

Yours truly,

[Evan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fast-moving book that also requires patience. It DOES all come together in part 3 -- not because the first two sections are faulty, but because the reality of one of the characters ends up making a great statement about the world that the other characters drift through in parts 1 & 2. Ed Park has a great sense of control over his narrative, especially considering how easy it would be to jump all over the place infinitely, there is a clear movement from character to character here. Are all the anecdotes elaborate? no -- but I felt like even the little, seemingly innocuous anecdotes ended up contributing to the overall themes and characters.

Not sure everyone would love this or find it funny (I spent time in a company eerily similar, so lots seemed familiar), but I thought this was well done and look forward to his future work!

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ed Park had the great misfortune of publishing his droll office satire about middle-aged employees of an anonymous company terrified of being fired, Personal Days, a year after Joshua Ferris got nominated for the National Book Award for his droll office satire about middle-aged employees of an anonymous company terrified of being fired, Then We Came to the End. The two books share enough surface similarities (particularly in the use of first-person plural) that it all but ensured that Park's would get buried alive -- there's only room in the literary ecosystem for one droll office satire about terrified employees, thankyouverymuch -- but having now re-read both books 12 years later, I think Personal Days holds up just as well.

I reaffirm my 4-star rating from 2008.

[Amanda · Rating 1 out of 5]

I gave this up to chapter 11 but just couldn't finish. The similarities between this title and "Then We Came to the End" (the first person plural narrative, the unnamed familiar corporate climate, the ensemble "cast") were distracting, especially since I found the "Then We Came to the End" to be funny, touching, and brilliant and this work a lot less so. Disappointing.

[Christina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very clever, very darkly funny. Echoes of Don DeLillo's White Noise for me. For anyone who lived through dotcom layoffs, this will ring true.

[Meagan Houle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book, I really did. The structure was interesting, the satire was on point, and I'm generally a huge fan of any book that pokes fun at corporate culture. In theory, I should have adored every page. But ...
That quirky structure rapidly became confusing. I couldn't keep the characters straight for the most part, because they seemed so interchangeable and impossible to get to know. It's not an excessive length, but I couldn't quite finish the book, stopping 90% of the way through just to have it over with. Maybe there's some nuance at the very end that would have seduced me, but I doubt it. The whole thing should have been a short story, perhaps, or at least eased up on the incredibly long, confusing tangents and typo-riddled screeds.
I have respect for the author's writing chops, and I'm open to other works, but "Personal Days" just wasn't my thing.

[Jen Vera · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found Park’s debut to be a scathingly funny novel about working in cubicle hell. I really enjoyed the absurdity that Park wrote and the creeping sense of paranoia and anxiety throughout the book. If you like Severance, this book has similar vibes. I think the writing style is very engaging and inventive and crisp. I think the ensemble of characters in the book is one of its many strengths. They’re distinct and lovable in their own ways. Beneath the humor, this book had a deep exploration of modern work culture and questions of identity and purpose. The bureaucratic absurdity was really fun, especially as someone currently in the trenches of academia. It’s peak is the email manifesto written in the office basement, which is basically how my graduate thesis is going to go.

I will definitely be reading more of Park’s stuff.

[derek allard · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you've ever worked in a cubicle (bonus points if you've gone through a downsizing) you will relate to this book. It is very well written, bold in imagination, courageous in its structure. The first section of the book is told in the first person plural (we) and follows the coworkers through scenes that take place in unspecified times, little glimpses into their world. The second section trades in the first person plural for a more conventional third person perspective as the mysterious Grime comes aboard and the firings start happening. The final section is told in the first person singular (I) and takes the form as a desperate email from one of the characters to another. In structure it's a narrowing down that takes place and while it's an unusual choice it works very well. All the questions the book raises in the first two sections are answered in this email and there is a decidedly human ending that works very well. Highly recommended!

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here’s a quirky early-aughts office comedy, with eccentric coworkers and jabs at Windows XP galore, but subtle hints that something is happening just off camera become apparent early on. It’s hard to say much about this book without giving anything away, but I’d compare it to Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise in the sense that the second half re-invents the first. The genre is flipped in such a subtle, yet playfully awkward way that it turns a generic (but very funny) opening into an involved head-scratcher of a mystery (and still, very funny). Sample examples: coworkers who may or may not be higher-ups wreak superiority then dissolve into the unemployed ether, magical powers play minor parts in HR, bizarre clues are left by long-let-go staff in Siberia, an aptly named abandoned floor betwixt operating floors, need i say et cetera.

[Celine · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fitting read at the exact right time in my life
Ofc the evil villain was a spurned management consultant all along
Consultants r the final boss of corporate shilling and soullessness
Delightful overall tho finished in like three days thank u vinay

[Alex Jiménez · Rating 3 out of 5]

tbh idk how i feel abt this. yay marxist lit though!

[Sophie · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

oof

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this! I would probably give it 3 stars but “The Jilliad” sold it for me. Funny satire of office day-to-day that wasn’t boring to read.

[Jennie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Le sigh… WE cringe on…

[K]

ideal pairing with Blue Mountains (1983)