Ever since college, George Wren has dreamed of working at The Outsider, the prestigious weekly edited by his hero, the suave English expat Gilbert Twining.
So when George sees a listing for a junior editor, he trades in his job at CBS for half the salary – and a ringside seat in the unexpectedly cutthroat arena of a small-circulation, highbrow little magazine. To George’s surprise and dismay, The Outsider is seething with malcontents and mutineers, at least according to Twining, who keeps cornering George for after-work martinis, pouring out his anxieties, professional and otherwise, while George’s wife, Matilda, and baby son wait for him back in Queens.
An indelible satire of 1960s intellectual New York, Office Politics is also a celebration of that endangered species, the office, at its pettiest and most idealistic, as the proving ground where so much of grownup life takes place.
‘Sheed is one of the lamentably few American writers who understand that the office is at least as much home for many of us as home itself . . . [A] very funny, very wise, unjustly neglected book’ Washington Post
‘Mr. Sheed has much to say about how we treat and mistreat each other in the daily round –that is in the essentials – of ordinary and supposedly civilized life.’ New York Times
