When was the last time you laughed at work?: SEARCH WORK
Posted by Max Pearl on April 1, 2026
"If anything, we feel all these things even more exquisitely as we enter an era where the word “precarious” has started to seem like an understatement. That much is clear from Search Work: A Collective Inquiry into the Job Hunt. Out next month via progressive imprint OR Books, it’s a multi-genre anthology of essays, creative nonfiction, and zine-style book art compiled by Rachel Meade Smith, the writer and editor behind Words of Mouth, the widely circulated job listings newsletter for creative and adjacent fields. The book’s entries were culled from more than 1,100 pitches in response to an open call for musings and meditations on the subject of the job hunt. The result is a collection that, mercifully, goes beyond the impotence, injustice, and inadequacy felt by many of us in the ranks of the un- and underemployed, to ask how wage work can realistically square with the pursuit of a good and decent life."