ART OF ASKING YOUR BOSS FOR A RAISE (PB)

This playful novel originated with a 1968 invitation from IBM, then searching for a writer to explore the use of computers in literature. Georges Perec took up the invite and programmed an early computer to follow the steps an employee of a large corporation would take to submit a successful request for a raise. (Perec himself was such a lowly employee at the time, his prospects of getting a raise were as dim as those of the narrator of this tale.) From that algorithmic experiment grew this pioneering and enduring fiction.