{"product_id":"the-copywriter-9781668090008","title":"The Copywriter","description":"\u003cb\u003eA portrait of the poet as an office worker, plumbing the depths of the spiritual gulf between art and work.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIt's the summer of 2017 and D__, a poet working by day as a copywriter at a retail start-up, can't dispel a creeping sense of dissolution on the horizon. Whether it be the company's new twenty-four-year-old CEO, who has more charisma than work experience, the growing distance between D__ and his longtime girlfriend, or a mounting sense of unreality in the wake of the first delirious year of the Trump administration, there's a sense that things are speeding towards collapse--and that they've perhaps been unraveling for some time. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Borne along on these ambivalent straits, D__ begins to keep a notebook, filling it with everything: dreams, scenes from his own life, emails, and broadly-defined moments, both real and fictional, that he calls parables--attempts to learn from the underlying schedule of the universe, some music of the spheres that, if heard correctly, might help him finally understand his life, his art, and labor. Unfurling over the course of two years, season by season, \u003ci\u003e The Copywriter\u003c\/i\u003e circles a series of perennial questions, capturing in the process the unique absurdism of the gone-but-not-forgotten era of office culture between the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic: How should an artist balance a job and life when art doesn't fit into either category? How does one find meaning in work that is stubbornly, uncannily, comically meaningless? Does one need to find meaning in one's labor at all? What concessions do we make for the sake of a paycheck? What does all of this do to our art, and our souls? \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Utterly original and lyrically beautiful, burrowing deep into contemporary disaffection without falling under its spell, \u003ci\u003eThe Copywriter\u003c\/i\u003e is a comic story in the vein of Kafka's Jewish mysticism, following the absurd paths that office work can take us on, and the subtle ways in which seemingly mindless labor can determine our fate.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDaniel Poppick is the author of the poetry collections\u003ci\u003e Fear of Description\u003c\/i\u003e, a winner of the National Poetry Series, and\u003ci\u003e The Police\u003c\/i\u003e. His writing appears in \u003ci\u003eThe\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eNew Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Paris Review\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe New Republic\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Yale Review\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eBOMB\u003c\/i\u003e, and elsewhere. He works as a copywriter and lives in Brooklyn.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Scribner Book Company","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51986437013778,"sku":"9781668090008","price":18.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_f04915ea-550d-4fdd-837d-c8f2c5d780c2.jpg?v=1769592498","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/the-copywriter-9781668090008","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}