Please Be Advised

PLEASE BE ADVISED is award-winning author Christine Sneed’s bright, irreverent send-up of corporate America in the 21st 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 products. Featuring a rogue’s gallery of corporate cogs from drunk, womanizing, and often-delusional President 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.“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