Joe Meno is a fiction writer and playwright who lives in Chicago. He is a winner of the Nelson Algren Literary Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Great Lakes Book Award, and was a finalist for the Story Prize. He is the author of five novels and two short story collections including The Great Perhaps, The Boy Detective Fails, Demons in the Spring, and Hairstyles of the Damned. His short fiction has been published in One Story, McSweeney's, Swink, LIT, TriQuarterly, Other Voices, Gulf Coast, and broadcast on NPR. His nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times and Chicago Magazine. His stage plays have been produced in Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Charville, France. He is an associate professor in the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago.
Office Girl shelves neatly into the anti-establishment, punk-rock
canon Meno created with books like his breakthrough, Hairstyles of
the Damned.-- "Onion A.V. Club"
Along with PBRs, flannels, and thick-framed glasses, this
Millennial Franny and Zooey is an instant hipster staple. Plot
notes: It's 1999 and Odile and Jack are partying like it was . . .
well, you know. Meno's alternative titles help give the gist:
Bohemians or Young People on Bicycles Doing Troubling Things.
Cross-media: Drawings and Polaroids provide a playful, quirky
element.-- "Marie Claire"
Odile and Jack are . . . two characters in search of authentic
emotion . . . their pas de deux is . . . dynamic. Meno's plain
style seems appropriate for these characters and their occasions,
and the low-key drawings and amateur photographs that punctuate the
narrative lend a home-video feel to this story of slacker bohemia,
the temp jobs, odd jobs and hand jobs.-- "Chicago Tribune"
Wonderful storytelling panache . . . Odile is a brash, moody,
likable young woman navigating the obstacles of caddish boyfriends
and lousy jobs, embarking on the sort of sentimental journey that
literary heroines have been making since Fanny Burney's Evelina in
the 1770s. Tenderhearted Jack is the awkward, quiet sort that the
women in Jane Austen's novels overlook until book's end. He is
obsessed with tape-recording Chicago's ambient noises so that he
can simulate the city in the safety of his bedroom, 'a single town
he has invented made of nothing but sound.' Mr. Meno excels at
capturing the way that budding love can make two people feel brave
and freshly alive to their surroundings . . . the story of the
relationship has a sweet simplicity.-- "Wall Street Journal"
The talented Chicago-based Meno has composed a gorgeous little
indie romance, circa 1999...When things Get Weird as things do when
we're young, Meno is refreshingly honest in portraying lowest lows
and not just the innocent highs. A sweetheart of a novel, complete
with a hazy ending.
--Kirkus Reviews
Along with PBRs, flannels, and thick-framed glasses, this
Millennial Franny and Zooey is an instant hipster staple.
Plot notes: It's 1999 and Odile and Jack are partying like it
was...well, you know. Meno's alternative titles help give the gist:
Bohemians or Young People on Bicycles Doing Troubling Things.
Cross-media: Drawings and Polaroids provide a playful, quirky
element.
--Marie Claire Odile and Jack are...two
characters in search of authentic emotion...their pas de
deux is...dynamic. Meno's plain style seems appropriate for
these characters and their occasions, and the low-key drawings and
amateur photographs that punctuate the narrative lend a home-video
feel to this story of slacker bohemia, the temp jobs, odd jobs and
hand jobs.
--Chicago Tribune Meno's book is an
honest look at the isolation of being a creative person in your
twenties living in a city...Cody Hudson's hand-drawn illustrations,
which relate to the text only laterally, add a charm akin to the
small doodles that break up long New Yorker articles. The
photos by Todd Baxter add a third level to the package, helping to
make Meno's book feel more like an artwork.
--The Daily Beast, 3 Must-Read Offbeat
Novels A beguiling and slyly disquieting storyteller, Meno forges
surprising connections between deep emotion and edgy absurdity,
self-conscious hipness and timeless metaphysics. In this
geeky-elegant novel, Meno transforms wintery Chicago into a
wondrous crystallization of countless dreams and tragedies, while
telling the stories of two derailed young artists, two wounded
souls, in cinematic vignettes that range from lushly atmospheric
visions to crack-shot volleys of poignant and funny dialogue. With
bicycles in the snow emblematic of both precariousness and
determination, Meno's charming, melancholy, frank and droll love
story wrapped around an art manifesto both celebrates those who
question and protest the established order and contemplates the
dilemmas that make family, creativity, ambition and love
perpetually confounding and essential.
--Kansas City Star A wispy, bittersweet
(emphasis on the bitter, not the sweet) romance, Office
Girl is the story of Odile and Jack, a pair of alienated
twentysomething bohemians whose artistic ambitions are being worn
away by one soul-killing call-center job after another in
Chicago.
--Chicago Sun-Times Office Girl
is a bittersweet little love story framed by Bill Clinton's 1999
impeachment trial and the turn of the millennium...By letting his
characters be emotionally vulnerable, even shallow or trite--which
is to say...real--Meno supplies an off-kilter, slightly
inappropriate answer to the Hollywood rom-com. Meno is a deft
writer. The dialogue in Office Girl is often funny, the
pacing quirky, and some of its quick, affecting similes remind me
of Lorrie Moore.
--Chicago Reader Meno's books have become
increasingly liminal and idiosyncratic. In this latest, it feels as
if Meno has written the book he's been wanting to write for years,
combining all of those classic elements of his previous work: the
stop-and-start of youthful inertia, the painful purity of romance,
the way childhood informs (i.e. wrecks) us as adults and a direct
prose cut into vignettes and montage. He also works with longtime
collaborators photographer Todd Baxter and painter Cody
Hudson...Gorgeously packaged, it's like a Meno box set 15 years in
the making.
--Time Out Chicago It might be a standard
boy-meets-girl tale, if not for the fact that the boy likes to
record the sounds of gloves abandoned in snowdrifts, while the girl
has a penchant for filling elevators with silver balloons. It's
1999. Odile has left grad school while Jack's wife has recently
left him; after both stumble into jobs at the same telemarketing
firm, they meet, and it isn't long before he is supporting her
attempt to create a whimsical, anti-establishment art movement.
--Time Out New York Office Girl
might be Joe Meno's breakthrough novel. Set in 1999, Office
Girl tells the story of a pair of young, intelligent drifters
who decide to start their own art movement. It's a stripped-down
experience of a novel which means Meno's crystalline prose has a
chance to shine.
--The Stranger Office Girl is a
relatively simple love story: You know most of the beats and
understand from the beginning how the story needs to end; the
pleasure comes from the way Meno hits those beats, how he manages
his characters and moments. And some of those moments are really
excellent: Jack and Odile's drift toward a first kiss, for
instance, or their lovers' conspiracy, mirrored in Cody Hudson's
naive drawings. And the heavier ideas that Meno stuffs into the
corners around his self-consciously slight characters--like an
ongoing struggle with sound and music that's part of the last-act
climax--give the book more weight.
--Philadelphia City Paper A lithe,
winking take on the boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl cliche, Meno's
newest novel is like Perks of Being a Wallflower for the
20-something set--and just like that iconic novel of
creatives-in-crisis, this one is quirky, clever, and full of bitten
tongues and youthful dreaming. Add bicycles, fingerless gloves, and
one of the most twee art projects we could have ever imagined, and
you've got a charming and unpretentious hipster love story destined
to be the next cult classic.
--Flavorwire Office Girl shelves
neatly into the anti-establishment, punk-rock canon Meno created
with books like his breakthrough, Hairstyles of the
Damned.
--Onion A.V. Club Mr. Meno approaches his title
character's potentially depressing combination of disadvantageous
circumstances and poor choices with sufficient aesthetic distance
to find levity amid the angst. And while Office Girl is a
quick and easy read, it is not insubstantial.
--New York Journal of Books While
Office Girl features illustrations by artist Cody Hudson
and photographs by Todd Baxter, its real substance lies in the
story itself. Set in Chicago right before the new millennium, Meno,
a Chicagoan, explores the start of an art movement through the eyes
of two twenty-something dreamers in this novel.
--Michigan Avenue Magazine Joe Meno's
newest novel Office Girl, isn't some end-of-the-Millennium
gloomy read. Rather it's an unconventional call to action
encapsulating the lives of two 'creative souls' set adrift in urban
Chicago at the end of the twentieth century...Don't be fooled by
its lack of chapters and intermittent doodles, there are sections
that you will likely have to reread before you can truly grasp Jack
and Odile's motivations. At times it can even be a bit
disheartening, but that is actually what makes Office Girl
brilliant. Whether you are 13 or 30, it's the perfect book to pick
up when that nagging feeling of unrest captures you over your
current condition.
--Revel Rouse Magazine I was completely
charmed by its boy-meets-quirky girl romance. Office Girl
is unabashedly earnest. It's so sweet and sincere...The most
important detail is the year: 1999, a moment of uncertainty in the
world and the lives of the novel's couple...Today, when it seems
that most media is hellbent on constantly reflecting on and
reinventing our childhood and adolescence, it's refreshing to read
a novel that can be nostalgic without being ironic.
--Grantland Office Girl is
packed with whimsy and soft terror. It's emotionally affective and
its scenes are sometimes too familiar, as if you have once been
here yourself, in this same office, in that same bedroom, on that
same street. It's the tale of a weeklong romance that cuts to the
heart. At times you remember it like it was your own. Both Jack and
Odile suffer from their own inability to translate their thoughts
into words, and they possess a certain innocent, curious sexuality.
There's nothing graphic here, but the feelings are laid bare. And,
as if in a dream, you can watch those feelings winding themselves
through Jack and Odile's increasingly complex layers of
consciousness...It's a specific book about general rite of passage;
an investigation of that strange, dream-like transition between
youth and adulthood, where everything seems possible and terrifying
and wonderful all at once. Meno does good here.
--Anobium Joe Meno's Office Girl
draws the awkward love story of two twenty-somethings with grace
and empathy in this exceptional novel.
--Largehearted Boy Wistful, heartbreaking, and
melancholy, a sneakily tight manuscript that gets better and better
the farther you read.
--Chicago Center for Literature and Photography
With a format reminiscent of J.D. Salinger's Franny and
Zooey, Office Girl lets the reader develop his own
ideas about each of the two characters...There is a spark. There is
momentum.
--The Wichita Eagle The book is a love
story but one with a different twist on your typical
boy-meets-girl, then boy-loses-girl story...Office Girl by
Joe Meno has an indie feel...Meno captures perfectly the fleeting
thoughts of fancy of young people...Set in the whimsical, uncertain
time of young adult life when you don't know what you are doing
yet...What happens next is just like love...unpredictable. Joe Meno
has done a remarkable job of capturing an age old story, in a brand
new way. This is a bright read.
--California Literary Review The writing
in this novel is crisp and clever. It's art that's at times
beautiful without getting in the way of the story. Chicago becomes
a character in the novel the way it does in the works of Nelson
Algren and Saul Bellow, but it's Chicago that is between Algren's
gritty streets and Bellow's upscale avenues...It's the kind of book
that makes you blow off what you're supposed to be doing so you can
keep reading.
--Razorcake Young love. Bicycles. Art
school. Joe Meno's hipster romance about a couple going against the
grain bubbles with funny dialogue and the charm of a French new
wave movie (chalk it up to the whole defiant-youth-run-wild thing).
Black-and-white illustrations by artist Cody Hudson and photos by
up-and-comer Todd Baxter set the mood.
--DailyCandy Fresh and sharply observed,
Office Girl is a love story on bicycles, capturing the
beauty of individual moments and the magic hidden in everyday
objects and people. Joe Meno will make you stop and notice the
world. And he will make you wonder.
--Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief
I'm terrible, I bail on most books. Recent ones that delighted me
the whole way through were...Office Girl by Joe Meno.
--Maria Semple, author of Where'd You Go,
Bernadette, in the New York Times Book Review's By
the Book feature
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