The Employee

Translated, with an introduction, by Matt Seidel / June 2025 / 5.375 x 8, 192 pp. / 978-1-962728-05-8

A nameless employee stands outside the door to an office, hesitating to enter because he is five minutes late. A banal opening—echoing a banal title—that immediately launches into a frenetic narrative that gallops across genres, modes, and galaxies.

From an account of his feral childhood with a nymphomaniacal mother, multiple fathers, and a perishing supply of siblings, to his early development of a third arm and a second, jawless, head, the employee unspools his subsequent life as cherry-tree prisoner, voraciously unlucky lover, dead man, larva, traveling salesman of inutility, murder suspect, and many other employments, including that of ladder-descending bureaucrat and department-store wrapper. Years pass, return, and reverse through a series of inflicted hellscapes as a tension builds between an untrammeled imagination willing to commit any crime against the laws of time and space, and the inescapable rigidity of family, work, society, and—ultimately—the mind.

First published in French by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1958, The Employee was the recipient of the Grand Prix de l’Humour Noir in 1961. This first English-language translation presents a ferocious, vertiginous, entropic exercise of the imagination that will leave readers bewildered and breathless.

Jacques Sternberg (1923–2006) was a literary maverick, who wrote over fifty books that roamed freely through genre and influence without ever adhering to anything that might threaten constraint. His work engaged in forms of bureaucratic terror, humorous surrealism, pessimistic science fiction, absurdist theater, photomontage, over twenty anthologies on everything from eroticism to kitsch, as well as no less than five autobiographies and two dictionaries (one of them a dictionary of contempt). For a spell he was a member of the Panic Movement, founded by Fernando Arrabal, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland Topor.