A working library

A standard career ladder document is often aggressively detailed, listing out competencies, delivery outcomes, behavioral qualifications, technical achievements, and more, for what it takes to reach each level in an organization.

Making a Career in Dictatorship by Christian Gläßel & Adam Scharpf (Oxford, 2025) What if the standard career path was a driver of authoritarianism?

He, She, and It by Marge Piercy (Ballantine, 1991) Both Shira and her husband Josh are owned by the Y-S corporation, so it is the corporation that decides to award sole custody of their son, Ari, to Josh when they split.

Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy (Ballantine, 1976) Trapped in a mental institution in the twentieth century, Connie Ramos learns to visit the future.

In Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, Consuelo “Connie” Ramos is living in a mental institution in the twentieth century when she’s visited by a person from the future.

Lavinia by Ursula K.

“Talk about technology is an addiction,” writes Joanna Russ.

To Write Like a Woman by Joanna Russ (Indiana University Press, 1995) “[S]o much of what’s presented to us as ‘the real world’ or ‘the way it is’ is so obviously untrue that a great deal of social energy must be mobilized to hide that gross and ghastly fa…

In memory of Nevan Scott, 1985–2026 I met Nevan shortly after I began A Working Library.

Trouble on Triton by Samuel R.

“That’s how it is—we’re literate.

The Beginning Place by Ursula K.

In Virtue Hoarders, Catherine Liu’s polemic against the professional managerial class, she calls attention to how Obama talked about reading in the waning days of his presidency.

Virtue Hoarders by Catherine Liu (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) Catherine Liu argues that the professional managerial class (PMC) are marked by their use of meritocracy, philanthropy, and virtue signaling to promote the core premise of neoliberal e…

Was by Geoff Ryman (Penguin, 1992) In 1989, Jonathan boards a plane to Manhattan, Kansas, where he rents a car, explaining to the man at the Hertz desk that he’s dying.

In her 1974 essay “Escape Routes,” Le Guin addresses a common criticism of science fiction: The oldest argument against SF is both the shallowest and the profoundest: the assertion that SF, like all fantasy, is escapist.

The Language of the Night by Ursula K.

Kraken by China Miéville (Del Ray, 2010) Billy Harrow is taking people on a tour at London’s Natural History Museum when he makes an impossible discovery: the enormous specimen of Architeuthis dux, the museum’s carefully preserved giant squid, is gone, ta…

Near the end of The Tombs of Atuan, the wizard Ged is in the desert with a young woman, Tenar.

The Eye of the Heron by Ursula K.

Arriving in Germany in the summer of 1990, James C.

Two Cheers for Anarchism by James C.

The Rift by Nina Allan (Titan Books, 2017) Twenty years after she disappears without a trace, Selena’s sister Julie rings her up.

Reading is the art of attention.

I’ve talked about one just-so story of AI—the notion of its inevitability—and I want to talk about another, that AI will increase productivity.

A Granite Silence by Nina Allan (Riverrun, 2025) In 1934, eight-year-old Helen Priestly sets out from her home in Aberdeen, Scotland, and is never seen alive again.

One of the just-so stories we keep hearing about AI is that it’s inevitable, that the technology is here and will continue to be here, and we better get on board or get left behind.

Why We Fear AI by Hagen Blix & Ingeborg Glimmer (Common Notions, 2025) Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer make a compelling case for why we fear AI: our fears of what AI will do to us are really just our fears of what capitalism is already doing.

House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk (Riverhead, 1998) In a region that was once Germany but is now Poland, a woman and her husband make a life in a house where a stream runs through the foundation.

In the work against war, Woolf notes that women—unlike many of their brothers—have four great but perhaps misunderstood teachers: And those teachers, biography indicates, obliquely, and indirectly, but emphatically and indisputably none the less, were pov…

Pedro the Vast by Simón López Trujillo (Algonquin Books, 2021) Pedro is vast, but he is also hidden and mysterious, tucked behind locked doors and a colloquy of priests and doctors.

It is right that the murder of many people be mourned and lamented.

Reconsidering Reparations by Olúfémi O.

The Shapeless Unease by Samantha Harvey (Grove Press, 2020) Struck by the sudden and untimely death of her cousin, and distressed by the terrible political order, Samantha Harvey finds that she cannot sleep.

In one layoff announcement after another, we hear that AI can now do the work of a great many people, which is why far fewer people are needed to do the work.

The Third Reich of Dreams by Charlotte Beradt (Princeton University Press, 1966, 2025) In 1933, shortly after Hitler took power, Charlotte Beradt started having nightmares.

Rollo May asserts plainly in the opening pages of The Meaning of Anxiety that anxiety in fact has meaning, and that our aim cannot be to eliminate it but to work with it, and through it, to use it to propel our creativity and vigor for life.

The Meaning of Anxiety by Rollo May (Norton, 1950) Rollo May refutes the assertion that mental health is living without anxiety, proposing instead that anxiety is a necessary condition for creativity, intellect, and freedom.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Grove Press, 2023) Six people—four astronauts and two cosmonauts—circle the Earth.

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (Ecco, 1920) In a glass-walled city ruled by the totalitarian One State, citizens have no privacy, no identity, no freedom, and no names: they each bear only a number.

We are, once again and inexplicably, seeing a conversation unfold about reforming the military force in our streets, with body cameras and training standing in for a moral reckoning about the kind of world we want to live in, the kind of world that is liv…

The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara (Vintage, 1980) Velma Henry is brought before Minnie Ransom for a healing.

All industries and disciplines, over time, direct people into greater and greater specialization.

The Waves by Virginia Woolf (Mariner Books, 1931) Six children—three girls and three boys—play in a garden by the sea.

Our present-day realm of state terror operates through abductions, murders, and content farms.

A Strategy for Labor by André Gorz (Beacon Press, 1964) “A system that makes people work like zombies to produce useless, destructive, or self-destructive things has outlived its usefulness.”

“Again and again,” writes Hannah Proctor, I kept coming to the same conclusion, which provides no consolation at all: psychological experiences require patience while so much in the world demands urgency.

The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde (Penguin, 1980) Between 1978 and 1980, Audre Lorde wrote about her experience with breast cancer and mastectomy, connecting her trials and treatment to her own work and to the collective effort of liberation for all wome…

The word “burnout” has taken on so many meanings, become a kind of casual and generic refrain that seems to apply to everyone all the time, a condition of malaise and overwork that afflicts whole generations.

Burnout by Hannah Proctor (Verso, 2024) Hannah Proctor visits the concept of burnout not only as the sense of exhaustion and apathy that we commonly associate with it, but as the experience of political defeat—the disappointment, despair, and grief that e…