Orientation and Other Stories

Description

Across nine stories, Daniel Orozco turns workplaces and public institutions into stages for loneliness, danger, absurdity, and thwarted connection. In the title story, a new employee receives a second-person office tour whose brisk instructions gradually expose coworkers’ secret lives and the company’s sinister undercurrents. Elsewhere, official police reports become the unlikely record of a romance, while workers on a bridge confront a crisis that makes routine procedure suddenly inadequate. Orozco shifts among orientations, reports, group portraits, and more conventional narratives, using bureaucratic language to reveal the private fears it cannot contain. The collection’s deadpan comedy and sudden violence show people seeking intimacy inside systems designed to reduce them to roles, rules, and observable behavior.

Themes