Office Politics

“A masterpiece . . . One of the few genuinely comic novels since Lucky Jim.” —Elaine Dundy

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. Is Twining paranoid? Is he insane? Or are George’s new office-mates truly plotting an insurrection? And if so, what’s all of it got to do with George?

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.

Wilfrid Sheed (1930–2011) was born in London, the son of the prominent Catholic publishers Sheed & Ward. Raised between London and Philadelphia, educated at Oxford, Sheed eventually moved to New York, where he became an editor and critic at the magazines Jubilee and Commonweal and later a columnist at the New York Times Book Review. A survivor of polio who wrote memoirs of his illness, and of his addictions to drugs and alcohol, he also published nine novels, several essay collections, and books on baseball and jazz.

Gerald Howard is a retired book editor whose essays and reviews have appeared in a variety of publications. He is currently working on a biographical study of the editor and critic Malcolm Cowley.