The Copywriter: A Novel
Feb 2026 · Sold by Simon and Schuster
star
1 review
Ebook
224
Pages
family_home
Eligible
info
About this ebook
A “genuinely transcendent” (The New Yorker) portrait of the poet as an office worker, plumbing the depths of the spiritual gulf between art and work.
It’s the summer of 2017 and D__, a poet working by day as a copywriter at a retail start-up, can’t dispel a creeping sense of dissolution on the horizon. Whether it’s the company’s new twenty-four-year-old CEO, the growing distance between D__ and his longtime girlfriend, or a mounting sense of unreality in the wake of the first delirious months of the Trump administration, there’s a sense that things are speeding towards collapse—and that they’ve perhaps been unraveling for some time.
Borne along on these ambivalent straits, D__ begins to keep a notebook, filling it with everything: scenes from his own life, dreams, poetic fragments, stoned revelations, and broadly defined moments, both real and fictional, that he calls parables: attempts to learn from the underlying schedule of the universe, some music of the spheres that, if heard correctly, might help him finally tie together the disparate threads of his life, his poetry, and his labor. As the notebooks fill up over the course of two years, season by season, D__ circles a series of perennial questions about art and work, capturing in the process the unique absurdism of the gone-but-not-forgotten era of office culture between the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Comic and profound, an intricate collage of a novel that plants itself in exhausted earth and, somehow, flourishes” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), The Copywriter is a story following the absurd paths that office work can take us on and the subtle ways in which seemingly mindless labor can determine our fate.
It’s the summer of 2017 and D__, a poet working by day as a copywriter at a retail start-up, can’t dispel a creeping sense of dissolution on the horizon. Whether it’s the company’s new twenty-four-year-old CEO, the growing distance between D__ and his longtime girlfriend, or a mounting sense of unreality in the wake of the first delirious months of the Trump administration, there’s a sense that things are speeding towards collapse—and that they’ve perhaps been unraveling for some time.
Borne along on these ambivalent straits, D__ begins to keep a notebook, filling it with everything: scenes from his own life, dreams, poetic fragments, stoned revelations, and broadly defined moments, both real and fictional, that he calls parables: attempts to learn from the underlying schedule of the universe, some music of the spheres that, if heard correctly, might help him finally tie together the disparate threads of his life, his poetry, and his labor. As the notebooks fill up over the course of two years, season by season, D__ circles a series of perennial questions about art and work, capturing in the process the unique absurdism of the gone-but-not-forgotten era of office culture between the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Comic and profound, an intricate collage of a novel that plants itself in exhausted earth and, somehow, flourishes” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), The Copywriter is a story following the absurd paths that office work can take us on and the subtle ways in which seemingly mindless labor can determine our fate.
A “genuinely transcendent” (The New Yorker) portrait of the poet as an office worker, plumbing the depths of the spiritual gulf between art and work.
It’s the summer of 2017 and D__, a poet working by day as a copywriter at a retail start-up, can’t dispel a creeping sense of dissolution on the h...
Discover more
Ratings and reviews
1 review
About the author
Daniel Poppick is a poet and novelist. His debut novel is The Copywriter. He is also the author of the poetry collections Fear of Description, selected for the National Poetry Series, and The Police. His work appears in The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, The Drift, Harper's, BOMB, The New Republic, Chicago Review, and other journals. The recipient of awards from the MacDowell Colony and the Corporation of Yaddo and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he currently lives in Brooklyn, where he works as a copywriter and coedits the Catenary Press.
Daniel Poppick is a poet and novelist. His debut novel is The Copywriter. He is also the author of the poetry collections Fear of Description, selected for the National Poetry Series, and The Police. His work appears in The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, The Drift, Harper's, BOMB, The New Re...
Rate this ebook
Tell us what you think.
Reading information
Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.
