The Copywriter: A Novel

A “genuinely transcendent” (The New Yorker) portrait of the poet as an office worker, plumbing the depths of the spiritual gulf between art and work.

It’s the summer of 2017 and D__, a poet working by day as a copywriter at a retail start-up, can’t dispel a creeping sense of dissolution on the horizon. Whether it’s the company’s new twenty-four-year-old CEO, the growing distance between D__ and his longtime girlfriend, or a mounting sense of unreality in the wake of the first delirious months of the Trump administration, there’s a sense that things are speeding towards collapse—and that they’ve perhaps been unraveling for some time.

Borne along on these ambivalent straits, D__ begins to keep a notebook, filling it with everything: scenes from his own life, dreams, poetic fragments, stoned revelations, and broadly defined moments, both real and fictional, that he calls parables: attempts to learn from the underlying schedule of the universe, some music of the spheres that, if heard correctly, might help him finally tie together the disparate threads of his life, his poetry, and his labor. As the notebooks fill up over the course of two years, season by season, D__ circles a series of perennial questions about art and work, capturing in the process the unique absurdism of the gone-but-not-forgotten era of office culture between the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Comic and profound, an intricate collage of a novel that plants itself in exhausted earth and, somehow, flourishes” (Kirkus, starred review), The Copywriter is a story following the absurd paths that office work can take us on and the subtle ways in which seemingly mindless labor can determine our fate.