How would you respond if someone asked you, “If you walk into a liquor store to count the unsold bottles, but the clerk is screaming at you to leave, what do you do?” during a job interview? At The Morning News, Giles Turnbull tried to answer the weirdest job interview questions. His answer to the question: “What in the name of God would I be doing counting unsold bottles in a liquor store? Are you trying to fuck with my mind?”
How Badly Do You Want this Job?
Get Your First Edition Fix
Brooklyn’s Greenlight Bookstore just launched a First Editions Club where members get a signed first edition of a new book each month. Some recent selections include: George Saunders’s Tenth of December (our review), Jonathan Dee’s A Thousand Pardons (our review), and Philipp Meyer’s The Son.
Toni Morrison and Junot Díaz in Conversation
Recommended Viewing: Toni Morrison spoke with Junot Díaz at the New York Public Library last week, and the organizers were good enough to record the entire conversation and put it online. The talk begins at the 40:09 mark, so you can either fast forward or click this link right here.
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The Young Library
One downside to being an internationally acclaimed author is that people care an awful lot about digging into your past. Haruki Murakami has found this out the hard way, as a librarian from Kobe High School (which Murakami attended during his younger years) has made public a list of books checked out by then-budding author. For more “Murakami meets library,” here’s a review of his own The Strange Library.
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Accounting For Taste
Accounting for taste: a Cambridge University psychologist has concluded that people’s aesthetic tastes can be broken down into five “entertainment-preference dimensions.” (via Book Bench)
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Talking Covers with Jonathen Lethem
Sean Manning (of Talking Covers) hosted a discussion with Jonathan Lethem last week at LA’s Last Bookstore. You can check out video and audio of the event over here, and the post also features an exclusive glimpse at the cover art for Lethem’s forthcoming novel Dissident Gardens. (Bonus: a look at Dissident Gardens in our Great 2013 Book Preview.)
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“I would leave everything here”
Recommended Reading: László Krasznahorkai’s “I Don’t Need Anything from Here,” which might be one of the shortest sentences he’s ever written.
Photographing the Cool Kids
What does it mean to be cool? According to scholar Joel Dinerstein, it means a person who conveys “relaxed intensity.” Using this definition, Dinerstein and Frank Goodyear III curated a photography exhibition of “American Cool” at National Portrait Gallery. The portraits feature everyone from Joan Didion to David Byrne.
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Since a high proportion of (notably fiction) writers need to earn their bread in some way or another and be forced to put up with such idiocy, I would advise pretending you are a 1950’s era secret agent and the entire job interviewing/hiring/work-life environment is East Berlin:
a.) Beware intelligence and quirkiness in answering questions of this type. The fact you have to go through this process is a sign you are applying for a job in which such qualities are not valued. Do not abandon assumption without extensive verification situation is otherwise.
a.) Seek to blend in and subvert them from the inside for your own gain. Keep an eye out for excess staplers, note pads, and pencils. There is nothing like writing with note pads and pencils.
b.) Develop careful alliances with others of like mind (ideally from the shipping company downstairs). Ridicule entire system with abandon in neutral territory. Develop new ideas for subversion.
c.) Know the terrain and hostile forces. I could have accurately predicted one layoff in Feb 2008 by correctly assessing the passive-aggressive body language of the person who hired me the previous August. Another person gave away his obsessive compulsive micromanaging in the simple act of putting on and taking off his winter gloves several times during the interview. If you have an overwhelming, gut-deep urge to run out the door in a cold sweat during the interview, for God sakes, RUN!
d.) Get the ‘canned answers’ to these questions. Practice until you can recite them automatically and with a fanatical gleam in your eye. (Repeat 1000 times.. “The bottles WILL be counted! The bottles WILL be counted!)
Good luck. I will deny ever having briefed you on any of this. If caught, you are on your own.
Moe Murph
Battle-Hardened Administrative Dogsbody