Adelle Waldman’s much-anticipated new novel, Help Wanted (2024), explores the lives and economic hardships of retail workers at a big box store in Upstate New York.
Kirkus called it, “The workplace dramedy of the year.” A New York Times Editors’ Choice, it was noted as a major new book by Lit Hub, Vogue, Vulture, New York, and Elle. Waldman’s previous novel, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (2013), was a national bestseller. Widely-hailed as a 21st century “comedy of manners,” the book told the tale of a successful and self-absorbed young writer, and his romantic conquests in New York City’s hip literary world. The Boston Globe said, “Adelle Waldman just may be this generation's Jane Austen.”
Cosponsored by the UAlbany English Department’s Creative Writing Program and Young Writers Project, and the Writing & Critical Inquiry Program (WCI).
Reviews
“I can’t think of a book more necessary. Adelle Waldman takes us into the universe of American labor with generosity and compassion. It has been a while since workers have been portrayed through the lens of a novelist with such insight and attention to the details of service industry life. Simply enthralling.”
― Gary Shteyngart, author of Our Country Friends
“How did the writer of a novel that precisely described the parties and bedrooms of literary Brooklyn transform into the writer of Help Wanted, a deeply political yet highly readable story about the lives of low-wage workers? The answer might be that the novels have more in common than is readily apparent, despite their very different settings; both of them capture a world and a moment in time in a way that’s become unstylish in recent literary history and has more in common with the works of George Eliot and Jane Austen than most novels published today.”
—Emily Gould, New York Magazine
“If you want to read a novel in this election year about everyday life for low-paid Americans, then Help Wanted should be at the top of your reading list… Its characters work unloading stock at Town Square, a fictional superstore in the equally fictional Potterstown, New York… but their experiences resonate beyond its garishly lit aisles and reveal much about what F Scott Fitzgerald called ‘the dark fields of the republic.’… It’s like the TV drama Succession except with more likeable characters and pay grades that are unimaginably different.”
—Max Liu, Financial Times
