Description: "I love Helen Phillips''s wild, brilliant, eccentric brain. Her vision flashes down like a lightning bolt into everyday terrors--having a baby, caring for a sick relative, raising a child in a city suffocating for lack of green space--but in a way so wonderfully awry that every single story in Some Possible Solutions has a freshness to it that comes as a shock to the reader''s system." --Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies "Helen Phillips sings like a Siren on the page (if a Siren also had a killer sense of humor). The short stories in Some Possible Solutions feature doppelgangers and sister-savants, impossible staircases and surreal city parks; they swing open like doors onto rich, strange worlds, which, on closer inspection, reveal themselves to be our own...These tales are true originals, shining their eerie, lovely lights on the water and asking questions that linger." --Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia! Praise for Helen Phillips and The Beautiful Bureaucrat "Unusual . . .deeply interesting . . .It''s an irresistible setup and if that''s all there were, it would be enough . . . [But] Mrs. Phillips has a wickedly funny eye, a fine sense of pacing, a smooth, winning writing style and a great gift for a telling detail . . . breathtaking and wondrous." --Sarah Lyall, The New York Times "Riveting. . . .Phillips''s thrillerlike pacing and selection of detail as the novel unfolds is highly skilled...What makes The Beautiful Bureaucrat a unique contribution to the body of existential literature is its trajectory, as the story telescopes in two directions, both outward to post macro questions about Gd and the universe, and inward to post intimate inquiries about marriage and fidelity. Ultimately, The Beautiful Bureaucrat succeeds because it isn''t afraid to ask the deepest questions." -- Jamie Quatro, The New York Times Book Review "Equal parts mystery, thriller, and existential inquiry, Phillips''s book evokes the menace of the mundane... The Beautiful Bureaucrat asks uneasy questions about work and life, love and power, and where the whole enterprise of one''s own small life is swiftly headed." -- Anna Weiner, The New Republic "Kafka would love The Beautiful Bureaucrat...Bizarre and painfully human. . . a surprising revelation of a book from an uncompromising author as unique as she is talented." -- Michael Schaub, NPR "Told with the light touch of a Calvino and the warm heart of a Saramago, this brief fable-novel is funny, sad, scary, and beautiful. I love it." --Ursula K. Le Guin "Part dystopian fantasy, part thriller, part giddy literary-nerd wordplay, Helen Phillips'' The Beautiful Bureaucrat is both a page-turner and a novel rich in evocative, starkly philosophical language...eerie, stomach-dropping...this novel ultimately proves both clever and impossible to put down." -- The L.A. Times " The Beautiful Bureaucrat is a thrillingly original debut, formally inventive and emotionally complex. Helen Phillips is one of the most exciting young writers working today, and I envy those who get to discover her work here for the first time." --Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation "Helen Phillips'' The Beautiful Bureaucrat has the compulsive quality of a mystery and the furious urgency of a fever dream. I picked it up and read it everywhere: on the subway, over breakfast, in bed when I should have been sleeping, at work when I should have been working. It will coax you into its world with the crystalline precision of its prose, so full of heart and strangeness it might even crawl into your own dreams and find you there." --Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams

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