After a revealing and compulsive second season of Severance, we’re faced with another wait for the next—though hopefully it won't be quite as long as we had to wait for Season 2. If you’re not ready to sever ties with the show, fear not. These listens all capture some of the qualities that make Severance so compelling—from the eerie liminality of the office space, to the threat of malicious and mysterious corporate overlords, to the absurdity of modern working culture.
Piranesi lives in the House. Perhaps he always has. In his notebooks, day after day, he makes a clear and careful record of its wonders: the labyrinth of halls, the thousands upon thousands of statues, the tides that thunder up staircases, the clouds that move in slow procession through the upper halls. Messages begin to appear, scratched out in chalk on the pavements. There is someone new in the House. But who are they and what do they want?
In a windowless building in a remote part of town, the newly employed Josephine inputs an endless string of numbers into something known only as The Database. After a long period of joblessness, she's not inclined to question her fortune, but as the days inch by and the files stack up, Josephine feels increasingly anxious in her surroundings—the office's scarred, pinkish walls take on a living quality, the drone of keyboards echo eerily down the long halls. When one evening her husband, Joseph, disappears and then returns, offering no explanation as to his whereabouts, her creeping unease shifts decidedly to dread.
The human and humanoid crew members of the Six-Thousand Ship complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew becomes strangely and deeply attached to them, even as tensions boil toward mutiny.
Across two parallel narratives, Murakami draws listeners into a mind-bending universe in which Lauren Bacall, Bob Dylan, a split-brained data processor, a deranged scientist, his shockingly undemure granddaughter, and various thugs, librarians, and subterranean monsters collide to dazzling effect.
A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: It’s close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing, and, ideally, very little thinking. As she moves from job to job—writing trivia for rice cracker packages and punching entry tickets to a purportedly haunted public park - it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all but something altogether more meaningful. But when she finally discovers an alternative to the daily grind, it comes with a price.
Nestled among Seattle's skyscrapers, The Zephyr Holdings Building is a bleak rectangle topped by an orange-and-black logo that gives no hint of Zephyr's business. Lack of clarity, it turns out, is Zephyr's defining characteristic. Stephen Jones, a young recruit with shoes so new they squeak, does his best to fit in with his fellow workers, but he is nagged by a feeling that the company is hiding something. Something that explains why when people are fired, they are never heard from again; why every manager has a copy of the Omega Management System; and most of all, why nobody in the company knows what it does.
Gerald, a mid-level employee of a New York-based public relations firm, has been uploaded into the company’s internal Slack channels - at least his consciousness has. His colleagues assume it’s an elaborate gag to exploit the new work-from-home policy, but now that Gerald’s productivity is through the roof, his bosses are only too happy to let him work from...wherever he says he is. The longer Gerald stays in the void, the more alluring and absurd his reality becomes.
When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime—even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.
Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; all the members of the second expedition died by suicide; the third expedition died in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another; the members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within months of their return, all had died of aggressive cancer. This is the twelfth expedition.
When ordinary family man Soren Johansson dies, he wakes to find himself cast by a God he has never heard of into a Hell whose dimensions he can barely grasp: a vast library he can only escape from by finding the book that contains the story of his life. In this haunting existential novella, author, philosopher, and ecologist Steven L. Peck explores a subversive vision of eternity.
Bob Arctor is a dealer of the lethally addictive drug Substance D. Fred is the police agent assigned to tail and eventually bust him. And since Substance D, which Arctor takes in massive doses, gradually splits the user's brain into two distinct, combative entities, Fred doesn't realize he is narcing on himself. Caustically funny, Philip K. Dick's industrial-grade stress test of identity is as unnerving as it is enthralling.