Help Wanted

Adelle Waldman is the best-selling author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., which was named a best book of the year by the New Yorker, Economist, NPR, Elle, and many others. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, among other publications. She lives in New York State.

Waldman is a sharp observer of the world, a writer whose attention to particulars only sharpens the bigger picture
A brilliant diagnosis and a moving account of retail workers hidden in plain sight all around us whose full humanity has simply never been so richly displayed or touchingly rendered
A classic of our age. Adelle Waldman turns the seemingly unremarkable matter of a retail job vacancy into a gripping study of conscience, morality and camaraderie. Help Wanted illuminates an entire universe that rarely features in literature revealing rich, nuanced, characters and the choices they face
Finally, the profoundly human big-box store truck-unloading novel you were waiting for. Help Wanted is like a great nineteenth-century novel about now, at once an effervescent workplace comedy and an exploration of the psychic toll exacted by the labour market. The characters are so richly drawn-so full, under all their defences, of the desire to be loved-that even the annoying ones will win your heart. When the book came to an end, I felt bereft. Adelle Waldman is a master
I can't think of a book more necessary. Adelle Waldman takes us into the universe of American labour with generosity and compassion ... Simply enthralling
Help Wanted is a serious moral inquiry, through the medium of fiction, into the lives of a group of people who work in a big-box store in an American town that has seen better days. It's a book about work; about the retail industry in the age of Amazon; and about the effects of late capitalism on human relations. It is also hard to put down. This book should be assigned in business schools, but it won't be; the world it depicts is not the one dreamt of in their philosophy
What a gorgeous and ingenious and heartfelt work Help Wanted is!
Help Wanted isn't just smart and funny and wise. It's also vital to our understanding of how and why the American dream is becoming increasingly inaccessible to working-class Americans
Waldman applies her sharp sense for relational drama and dark comedy to the retail sector... The book shines