Please Be Advised - by Christine Sneed (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Please Be Advised is award-winning author Christine Sneed's bright, irreverent send-up of corporate America in the 21^st century. Mixing cultural critique and formal inventiveness with wicked laughs and the sort of surrealistic mysteries only a novel about the corporate world could give us, Please Be Advised tracks the decline, fall, and possible resurrection of Quest Industries, one of the world's foremost purveyors of collapsible, portable, and (occasionally) dangerous office machines. Featuring a rogue's gallery of corporate cogs from drunk, womanizing, and often-delusional CEO Bryan Stokerly, Esq. to his executive secretary, the brainy, libidinous Hannah Louise Schmidt and his soon-to-be-rival, new office manager and disgraced former coroner, Dr. Ken Crickshaw, Jr., Please Be Advised will leave you laughing at a work world more like our own than most of us would care to admit.

Review Quotes

"Cubicle culture has never been targeted more hilariously than in Sneed's exuberant, totally-told-through-memos tale of the rise and fall of Quest Industries. Sneed unfolds the petty triumphs, the staff shenanigans, and the absolute zany weirdness of working in a company that operates more as a dysfunctional family than an industry. Definitely not business as usual-oh no, it's so much better."

-Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of With or Without You

"Attention, fans of The Office, "Dilbert" readers, and survivors of corporate culture: Please Be Advised is for you. Christine Sneed has perfectly captured the peculiarities and foibles of the 9-5 cubicle world - from refrigerator thievery to conference room ghosts. This book is great fun."

-Julie Schumacher, author of Dear Committee Members and The Shakespeare Requirement

"Christine Sneed's Please Be Advised arrives, on the face of it, as a delirious (or is it despondent?) office comedy, but it is only a matter of a few pages before it spirals off into the surreal, becomes as thrillingly disquieting as anything by those twin masters of the American berserk, Donald Antrim and Donald Barthelme. If the workplace is the wellspring of most of our adult unhappiness--and most of our adult inertia--Sneed's book is the fire alarm, the quick hit of acid, the act of righteous vandalism that wakes us up and dispels the nightmare. Seriously funny, and curiously tender beneath all the chaos, Please Be Advised is a delight from end to end."

-Matthew Specktor, author of Always Crashing in the Same Car and American Dream Machine

"Has anybody captured the petty power struggles, the absurd awkwardnesses, and the ineffable humiliations of office life as brilliantly and with as much humor as Christine Sneed in her novel-in-memos Please Be Advised? They have not. Make sure you get the memo and read it."

-Kathleen Rooney, author of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey

"In the tradition of Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End, Daniel Orozco's "Orientation," and Julie Schumacher's Dear Committee Members, Christine Sneed's Please Be Advised is more than a workplace comedy-it is a journey into the comic absurd. The pettiness, the MBA-speak, the TMI, the gratuitous acronyms and false cheer... the world of the office inbox is all there in its full reply-all apocalyptic glory. To make a solitary reader laugh out loud is one of the hardest tasks a writer can undertake; Sneed accomplishes this feat page after page, memo after memo, vignette after vignette, and emoji after emoji, leaving smile lines on your face and a cathartic joy in your heart."

-Phong Nguyen, author of Bronze Drum and The Adventures of Joe Harper