Work is the all-American pastime, taking more and more of our waking hours, and infiltrating our sleep. It’s been grist for books from Studs Turkel’s "Working" to Joshua Ferris’ "And Then We Came to the End" to Joseph Heller’s "Something Happened,"set in an ad agency circa "Mad Men."

Recently we asked NBCC members, former awards winners and finalists, What’s your favorite book about work? The responses to this NBCC Reads series poured in (a few within minutes). Books ranged all over the map. Several books gathered multiple endorsements, including Philip Levine's "What Work Is," Ed Park's "Personal Days," Tom Rachman's "The Imperfectionists," "Two-Up" by NBCC board member Eric Miles Williamson, George Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London."  The long tail of individual favorites began with NBCC Balakian award winner Joan Acocella's pick, Penelope Fitzgerald's "Human Voices." Today's entry is from NBCC member John Domini.

In picking the best books about work, I find myself picking, plain and simple, the best books.  That is, the inimitable masterpiece that is Kafka's "The Trial" holds such a high place in the culture because, among its other haunting touchstones, it offers a spot-on portrayal of those illogical bureaucratic thickets we call the law and -- of course -- the insurance business. That business, after all, was where Kafka earned his daily bread.  So too, Joyce's "Ulysses" shines with special wit and wordplay in its chapters on arenas where the Irish expat himself tried to cobble together a living.  There's Dedalus and his pickup teaching jobs (consider Stephen's meditation on a student asking for help: "My childhood bends before me") and Bloom's scuffling after advertising commissions (consider the chuckle-worthy headlines "K.M.A." and "K.M.R.I.A.")  

As for Americans, well, of course one thinks of Stanley Elkin [an NBCC award winner],who claimed he loved "shoptalk" and couldn't write a book till he'd hit on the protagonist's job.  His greatest imaginative entry into another way of life remains the novella "The Bailbondsman," an accomplishment quite unique among our best fictions.  But then again, who did a better job with a job than Melville, reveling in the stink of goo of whaling, in "Moby-Dick"?  More recently, who more thoroughly eviscerated the heartless cadaver of American business -- the same callousness of the super-rich that now drives Occupy Wall Street -- than William Gaddis in "JR"?

Work is the all-American pastime, taking more and more of our waking hours, and infiltrating our sleep. It’s been grist for books from Studs Turkel’s "Working" to Joshua Ferris’ "And Then We Came to the End" to Joseph Heller’s "Something Happened,"set in an ad agency circa "Mad Men."

Recently we asked NBCC members, former awards winners and finalists, What’s your favorite book about work? The responses to this NBCC Reads series poured in (a few within minutes). Books ranged all over the map. Several books gathered multiple endorsements, including Philip Levine's "What Work Is," Ed Park's "Personal Days," Tom Rachman's "The Imperfectionists," "Two-Up" by NBCC board member Eric Miles Williamson, George Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London."  The long tail of individual favorites began with NBCC Balakian award winner Joan Acocella's pick, Penelope Fitzgerald's "Human Voices."Today's entry is from NBCC member and Bookslut columnist Kerri Arsenault.

Work can kill you. Nobody understands this more than Jim Harrison. Eat or die, his self-avowed motto, is ideal for a man who infamously tucked into a colossal multi-course meal with Orson Welles at Ma Maison only to top it off with a street cart hotdog. Eating, cooking, and writing—pastimes I also enjoy—collide in Harrison’s collection of previously published food essays, The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand.The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand. His writing, eating, and cooking scale the precipice of the divine and he should be revered for all, for they go beyond mere sustenance in their respective categories. A “multiple entrée kind of guy”, Harrison shared 19 duck legs with Guy de la Valdene; prepared “roasted doves and quail with a fois gras sauce; a small wild pig with a garlic fruit sauce with a roast teal for a starter; and some grilled barnyard chickens with a paste of garlic and rosemary added late in the cooking and with an appetizer of stone-crab claws” alongside “collard, mustard, and turnip greens, plus dozens of vegetables…and a couple of cases of good northern Italian wine” and after a visit to his therapist ate “a quick boiled pig hock, then on to the Papaya King hot-dog stand…for a quick frank with sauerkraut and mustard, down Third to Ray’s for a slice of pizza with eggplant, then over to JG Melon for a simple rare burger and a double V.O.”. His epic meals, however, belie the delicacy of his poetic prowess.

“Eat or Die” is also the first chapter in The Raw and the Cooked, where Harrison’s opines, “many of our failures in politics, art, and domestic life come from our failure to eat vividly….” Of these debacles, Harrison cannot be accused. For he has lived a life well-done and done it well.

Work is the all-American pastime, taking more and more of our waking hours, and infiltrating our sleep. It’s been grist for books from Studs Turkel’s "Working" to Joshua Ferris’ "And Then We Came to the End" to Joseph Heller’s "Something Happened,"set in an ad agency circa "Mad Men."

Recently we asked NBCC members, former awards winners and finalists, What’s your favorite book about work? The responses to this NBCC Reads series poured in (a few within minutes). Books ranged all over the map. Several books gathered multiple endorsements, including Philip Levine's "What Work Is," Ed Park's "Personal Days," Tom Rachman's "The Imperfectionists," "Two-Up" by NBCC board member Eric Miles Williamson, George Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London."  The long tail of individual favorites began with NBCC Balakian award winner Joan Acocella's pick, Penelope Fitzgerald's "Human Voices." Today's choice is from Andrei Codrescu, whose new book is "whatever gets you through the night: a story of sheherezade and the arabian entertainments."

"Too Loud a Solitude" by Bohumil Hrabal is about a paper recycler in a communist basement in Prague, working all day to crush books and newspapers, some of which he saves for his pleasure in his bachelor room full of books threatening to crush him to death. This is the diary of the perfect worker in an absurdly utopian world that's made a fetish from work. Hrabal is funny, bitter, and profound at once, and you can see why Milan Kundera and many others adore him. Whenever I hear our politicians crying "jobs, jobs!" these days, I think of Hrabal's laboring ant and laugh. I used to have a Rimbaud quote on a poster on my wall when I started writing poetry -- it said: POETRY DEMANDS UNEMPLOYMENT. Damn right! But if you have to work, try to get a laugh out of it, or you'll end up insane.

Last Friday Bethanne Patrick discussed the NBCC award nominees with board member Carolyn Kellogg and Balakian awardee Ron Charles for Follow the Reader, a weekly book chat on Twitter. You can catch up on their conversation (and Follow the Reader in general) by following the hashtag #followreader.

Adam Kirsch reviews Dmitry Samarov’s Hack: Stories From a Chicago Cab at Salon.

Walton Muymba and Gregory Leon Miller discuss the works of Percival Everett at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Britt Peterson discusses the Foxfire books and their paradoxical relationship with today’s locavore and back-to-the-land movements in Slate.

Matthew Tiffany reviews Edmund White’s novel Jack Holmes & His Friend for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

David L. Ulin reviews criticism collections by John Updike and Willam H. Gass at the Los Angeles Times.

Joseph Peschel reviews Alan Lightman’s novel Mr. G for the Boston Globe.

Carmela Ciuraru reviews David Snodin’s novel Iago for USA Today.

Rayyan  Al-Shawaf reviews Jonathan Lyons’ Islam Through Western Eyes: From the Crusades to the War on Terrorism for the Boston Globe.

Tess Lewis reviews Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, translated and edited by Michael Hofmann, for the Wall Street Journal.

Stephen Burt reviews poetry collections by Juliana Spahr, Noah Eli Gordon, Anna Moschovakis, and Kathleen Ossip for the Nation.

Phillip Manning reviews J. Peder Zane’s Design in Nature: How the Constructal Law Governs Evolution in Biology, Physics, Technology and Social Organization for the Charlotte Observer.

Your reviews and recommendations help seed these roundups: If you’re an NBCC member with a review you’d like considered for inclusion, please email nbcccritics@gmail.com. You can also get our attention by using the Twitter hashtag #nbcc, posting on the wall of our Facebook page, or joining our members-only LinkedIn group.

Work is the all-American pastime, taking more and more of our waking hours, and infiltrating our sleep. It’s been grist for books from Studs Turkel’s "Working" to Joshua Ferris’ "And Then We Came to the End" to Joseph Heller’s "Something Happened,"set in an ad agency circa "Mad Men."

Recently we asked NBCC members, former awards winners and finalists, What’s your favorite book about work? The responses to this NBCC Reads series poured in (a few within minutes). Books ranged all over the map. Several books gathered multiple endorsements, including Philip Levine's "What Work Is," Ed Park's "Personal Days," Tom Rachman's "The Imperfectionists," "Two-Up" by NBCC board member Eric Miles Williamson, George Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London."  The long tail of individual favorites began with NBCC Balakian award winner Joan Acocella's pick, Penelope Fitzgerald's "Human Voices." Today's entry is from NBCC board member Oscar Villalon, managing editor of ZYZZYVA.

As it happens, I've got quite a few favorites. It's because I find novels that explore work -- what goes into labor: blue-collar, white-collar, criminal or artistic -- to be innately fascinating. There's a deep pleasure in reading a work of fiction and coming away from it with something practical, to be acquainted with the demands and responsibilities of a carpenter, a financier, a prep cook, or a car thief.

Ken Kesey's "Sometimes a Great Notion" and Richard Price's "Clockers" [a finalist for the NBCC award in fiction] are among my favorites: lumberjacking and policing and drug dealing, the mechanics of their execution, their various dangers, their respective cultures, and the economies surrounding each are laid out sumptuously in those novels.

But I would like to point people to another favorite, one whose service industry setting and noble modesty of its protagonists should be held in the front of our minds in these dispiriting times: Stewart O'Nan's "Last Night at the Lobster." As a crew of Red Lobster employees spend what might be their last day doing their jobs, O'Nan show us (if we didn't know already) that these tasks require skill and care, that the work is honorable. It's a lovely ode to decent, hard-working, multi-ethnic America, which is to say, it's a fine book about how millions of us unassumingly go about our worthy lives.

Work is the all-American pastime, taking more and more of our waking hours, and infiltrating our sleep. It’s been grist for books from Studs Turkel’s "Working" to Joshua Ferris’ "And Then We Came to the End" to Joseph Heller’s "Something Happened,"set in an ad agency circa "Mad Men."

Recently we asked NBCC members, former awards winners and finalists, What’s your favorite book about work? The responses to this NBCC Reads series poured in (a few within minutes). Books ranged all over the map. Several books gathered multiple endorsements, including Philip Levine's "What Work Is," Ed Park's "Personal Days," Tom Rachman's "The Imperfectionists," "Two-Up" by NBCC board member Eric Miles Williamson, George Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London."  The long tail of individual favorites began with NBCC Balakian award winner Joan Acocella's pick, Penelope Fitzgerald's "Human Voices." Today's entry is from Steve Isenberg, executive director of PEN American Center, which won the NBCC's Sandrof award for lifetime achievement. This year's Sandrof award will be accepted by Robert Silvers, a founder of the New York Review of Books, at the NBCC awards ceremony March 8 at 6 pm The New School. Free and open to the public. Details here.

Orwell in his essay on Dickens found that for all the memorable brilliance of his characters, Dickens had not "noticeably"  written well about "work."

When I read "The Secret Agent" and recall the conversations between the Chief Inspector and the Assistant Commissioner, and their deciphering of each other and their relationship, I find it all as good as anything on how senior bureaucrats in a politicized situation think and act. 

Mindful of the weight of the religious turns and end in "The Heart of the Matter,"  I believe Scobie to be a colonial cop of seasoning and sensibility which counts for much. 

And for all its great humor, Waugh's "Sword of Honour" makes you believe he knew, however much he larded up the absurdities, the idiom and turns of the soldiering and political wartime bureaucracy. Maybe cops and soldiers provide proven and known ground for the best novelists when it comes to the world of work.

And so Orwell's essay is worth looking at again to think about where work may not be as well written about and what we miss in imaginative literature if that is so.

Can you think of anything fuller and better on work of late than "Mad Men"?

Work is the all-American pastime, taking more and more of our waking hours, and infiltrating our sleep. It’s been grist for books from Studs Turkel’s "Working" to Joshua Ferris’ "And Then We Came to the End" to Joseph Heller’s "Something Happened,"set in an ad agency circa "Mad Men."

Recently we asked NBCC members, former awards winners and finalists, What’s your favorite book about work? The responses to this NBCC Reads series poured in (a few within minutes). Books ranged all over the map. Several books gathered multiple endorsements, including Philip Levine's "What Work Is," Ed Park's "Personal Days," Tom Rachman's "The Imperfectionists," "Two-Up" by NBCC board member Eric Miles Williamson, George Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London."  The long tail of individual favorites began with NBCC Balakian award winner Joan Acocella's pick, Penelope Fitzgerald's "Human Voices." Today's entry is from NBCC member David Abrams, who blogs about books at The Quivering Pen.

When we think about how the notion of "work" is portrayed in fiction, we probably go immediately to the tried and true: policeman, fireman, butcher, baker, candlestick maker.  Fueled by everything from the early readers of Richard Scarry to the latest Dilbert cartoon, labor in literature nearly always goes for the high-profile jobs.

But whoever thinks of a catfish farmer?

Larry Brown did and the result is a wonderful portrait of the modern working man in A Miracle of Catfish, Brown's posthumous novel published in 2007.  Tommy Bright is a down-on-his-luck owner of a fish-stocking business who, in the course of the novel, secretly slips a giant catfish named Ursula into 72-year-old Cortez Sharp's newly-dug pond.  A Miracle of Catfish is filled with more than a dozen memorable characters, but I particularly enjoyed the scenes involving Tommy and his big red truck compartmentalized with tanks holding crappie, largemouth bass, bluegills, and bream.

Brown takes pleasure in compiling the everyday minutiae of life. If you're the kind of reader who doesn't want to spend a whole chapter watching a man slowly filling a pond with buckets of fingerlings ("the water came flowing out in a wide tongue and the little catfish came swimming with it"), then this is probably not the book for you. The author takes his time, painting his huge mural with tiny brushstrokes.

Here is just one moment from Tommy's life when he's working late at his office out in the barn, agonizing over bills, balancing the books, and fretting over supplies needed to keep his fish alive:

He was too old to start over.  He was fifty-seven.  He ought to be thinking about retiring instead of all this bullshit.  Hell.  A man got old and tired.  He got tired of the things that happened to him on his job.  He'd lost count of the times he'd been finned by catfish, but he remembered the worst ones.  The one that got him all the way through the thumb that day in Hot Springs.  The one he stepped on that day in Batesville, Mississippi, and drove the fin up under his big toenail.  He had very nearly shit on himself for real when that one happened.  But hell.  Everybody had something on their job to worry about.  Firemen risked getting burned up.  Ironworkers had to deal with the reality of falling to their deaths.  Getting finned was a part of Tommy's life.  You just tried to minimize it as much as you could.  It helped to wear leather gloves.

Let us now praise the overlooked and overworked fish farmers of the world.