Description:
It can be enervating, stressful and, occasionally, triumphal--looking for work has never been more of a roller coaster. Now, in compelling testimonies, Search Work shares that experience, giving voice to those on the wild ride of finding a job.
Search Work asks what we uncover when we pause and examine the textures of something as mundane and tedious as the job hunt. In this anthology, made up of personal essays, archival job ads, labor research, and even a playscript, over fifty contributors reflect on the rituals, cultural artifacts, and emotional turbulence of looking for work. Their collective inquiry shows how and why the quest for a paycheck almost always morphs into something deeper--a search for belonging, a referendum on identity, a macro view of the systemic forces that govern our lives. Through a variety of formats and voices, Search Work shows how the labor of looking does more than land us a new job; it reshapes desire and alters our sense of self, sometimes for good.
The book was inspired by a free weekly newsletter that editor Rachel Meade Smith started ten years ago, Words of Mouth, which shares curated jobs and opportunities with an engaged community of over 70,000. From this community, Search Work brings together a diverse group of contributors--writers, artists, public servants, researchers, service workers, career changers, recent grads--to defang one of life's loneliest activities through an act of collaborative creation.
As entry-level paths vanish and AI redraws the labor map, Search Work offers a timely, refreshingly critical inquiry into the isolating and often absurd experience of job hunting.
Review Quotes:
"A creative response to a demoralizing reality."
--Publisher's Weekly
"The perfect LinkedIn era's companion to Studs Terkel's Working."
--Silvio Lorusso
"This book helps us think and talk about what work means to each of us and what it might look like moving forward."
--DW Gibson
"An astonishing book of messy reflections and experiences that won't fit in a LinkedIn profile."
--Gavin Mueller
"Search Work fills in the texture to the numbers, the human, often ludicrous journey that is contained within the shorthand 'job seeking' . . . the book's contributors offer answers from the inside."
--Alex Press
"Finding steady work has become a job unto itself, as this book reveals with candor and vim . . . Search Work is a bracing portrait of how we work now, and of what the hunt for a gig can teach us about ourselves and the world."
--Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
"This book's searing, funny and deeply human accounts illuminate capitalism's bardo: the modern job search. But amidst the misery, this book offers company--even solidarity. Read it to find friends in hell."
--Eleni Schirmer
"Job hunting is an uncanny, haunted, desertifying landscape. Search Work beautifully meets that weirdness with testimony and form, capturing the psychic costs of constantly packaging and translating oneself while insisting on the humanity and collective power of those who seek. Highly recommend this."
--Sarah T Mathews
"Goes beyond the impotence, injustice, and inadequacy felt by many of us in the ranks of the un- and underemployed, to ask how wage work can realistically square with the pursuit of a good and decent life."
--Max Pearl
"A balm for the loneliness and insecurity . . . Read all at once, especially in the middle of a job search, Search Work alleviates the despair, if only by proving the very obvious: If you're out of work now, you're not alone."
--Defector