Temporary

Eighteen boyfriends, twenty-three jobs, and one ghost who occasionally pops in to give advice: Temporary casts a hilarious and tender eye toward the struggle for happiness under late capitalism.

In Temporary, a young woman’s workplace is the size of the world. She fills increasingly bizarre placements in search of steadiness, connection, and something, at last, to call her own. Whether it’s shining an endless closet of shoes, swabbing the deck of a pirate ship, assisting an assassin, or filling in for the Chairman of the Board, for the mythical Temporary, “there is nothing more personal than doing your job.”

This riveting quest, at once hilarious and profound, will resonate with anyone who has ever done their best at work, even when the work is only temporary.

Publication date: March 3, 2020

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.25

Page count: 208 pages

ISBN: 9781566895668

Hilary Leichter’s writing has appeared in n+1, the New Yorker, the Cut, the Southern Review, and elsewhere. She has taught fiction at Columbia University and has been awarded fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Shortlisted for the 2021 Firecracker Award for Fiction

Shortlisted for the 2020 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

Longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award for a Debut Novel

A New York Times Editors' Choice

An NPR Favorite Book of 2020

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2020

An I-D Best Book of 2020

A Bustle Must-Read Book of 2020

A Thrillist Best Book of 2020

A Tor.com Best Book of 2020

A Refinery29 Best Indie Book of 2020

A Library Journal Best Debut Novel of 2020

“Temporary reads like a comic and mournful Alice in Wonderland set in the gig economy, an eerily precise portrait of ourselves in a cracked mirror.”

—Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

“[A] delirious and deeply humane satire. . . . Temporary has the manic, goofing energy of a lounge act.”

—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

“A batty, playful satire, Temporary twists the jargon and anxieties of a millennial gig economy into a dreamscape of spires and scaffolding through which we swing as our narrator seeks out her steadiness.”

—The Los Angeles Times

“Leichter has managed to blend the oddball and the existential into a tale of millennial woe that’s both dreadful and hilarious at once.”

—The Washington Post

“[A] deeply hilarious, surreal manifesto against late-stage capitalism, all wrapped up in a mushroom trip.”

—Tim Herrera, The New York Times

“Leichter’s funny, absurdist debut cleverly explores a capitalist society taken to a dreamlike extreme.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Refreshingly original.”

—The Chicago Tribune

“Unique, often elusive but always beautifully written.”

—Daily Mail UK

“[Leichter] takes numbing routines to dreamy (or perhaps nightmarish) extremes, delivering subversive entertainment in the process.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“If a Salvador Dali painting were reimagined as a contemporary novel, it would be Leichter’s Temporary.”

—Parade

“Leichter’s voice is lively, practically sprightly, and offers a smart balance to the big question she asks—When everything is considered work, how do we live outside of it?” 

—Vulture

“An absurd, laugh-out-loud funny critique of (and antidote to) the dystopia that is late-stage capitalism.”

—BuzzFeed

“A narrative so deliciously allusive and disarmingly literal that this reader kept thinking maximum glee had been attained, only for the glee to somehow grow even more maximal just a few sentences later.”

—Helen Oyeyemi