The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise —neurotic and pessimistic yet endearing comic and
never less than entertaining—is a penetrating vision of the world of office work. As translator
David Bellos writes it shows us what ‘computers perhaps even those powered today by AI
simply cannot do: make us laugh and make us cry’. This playful novel originated with a 1968
invitation from IBM then searching for a writer to explore the use of computers in literature.
Georges Perec took up the invite and programmed an early computer to follow the steps an
employee of a large corporation would take to submit a successful request for a raise. (Perec
himself was such a lowly employee at the time his prospects of getting a raise as dim as those
of the narrator of this tale.) From that algorithmic experiment grew this pioneering and
enduring fiction.
