Conversation with novelist Adelle Waldman, author Help Wanted
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.”
LIFE AT A BIG BOX STORE IN UPSTATE NEW YORK
Adelle Waldman
4:30 p.m. Thursday, September 26, 2024
University at Albany
Multi-Purpose Room, Campus Center West
1400 Washington Avenue Albany NY 12222
https://www.nyswritersinstitute.org/adellewaldman
Cosponsored by the UAlbany English Department’s Creative Writing Program and Young Writers Project, and the Writing & Critical Inquiry Program (WCI).
“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
