From 'The Everyday Housewife' to 'The Cougar', 'Tricks' to 'Snowflake Time', Laura Lippman's sharp and acerbic stories explore the contemporary world and the female experience through the prism of classic crime, where the stakes are always deadly.And in the collection's longest piece, the novella 'Just One More', she follows the trajectory of a married couple who, tired of re-watching 'Columbo' re-runs during lockdown, decide to join the same dating app:'Why would we do something like that?''As an experiment. And a diversion. We would both join, then see if the service matches us. Just for grins...'

How the brutalities of working life are transformed into exhaustion, shame, and self-doubt: a writer's account of her experience working in an Amazon fulfillment center. No longer able to live on the proceeds of her freelance writing and translating income, German novelist Heike Geissler takes a seasonal job at Amazon Order Fulfillment in Leipzig. But the job, intended as a stopgap measure, quickly becomes a descent into humiliation, and Geissler soon begins to internalize the dynamics and nature of the post-capitalist labor market and precarious work. Driven to work at Amazon by financial necessity rather than journalistic ambition, Heike Geissler has nonetheless written the first and only literary account of corporate flex-time employment that offers “freedom” to workers who have become an expendable resource. Shifting between the first and the second person, Seasonal Associate is a nuanced expose of the psychic damage that is an essential working condition with mega-corporations. Geissler has written a twenty-first-century account of how the brutalities of working life are transformed into exhaustion, shame, and self-doubt.

This report is based on the discussions at the 13th ADBI-OECD-ILO Roundtable on Labor Migration in Asia: Integrating Skills Development and Certification into the Labor Migration Cycle, held on 27–28 June 2023 in Bangkok, Thailand. The annual roundtable brings together labor experts and policy makers from across Asia to discuss trends in labor migration and emerging policy and issues on migrant workers. Chapter 1 analyzes labor migration flows in Asia and relevant policy developments, including a section on the flow and cost of remittances. Chapter 2 looks at the pathways for middle-skilled migration and the accompanying skills recognition or certification approaches in Singapore and Thailand, focusing on the construction sector. Chapter 3 examines programs for seasonal workers in Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, and how they relate to other programs for migrant workers in agriculture. The chapter also provides an overview of seasonal migrant worker options in the agriculture sector in Japan and the Republic of Korea, and Thai seasonal workers in Nordic countries. Statistical annexes provide updated economy-specific notes and comparative tables on country-level migration flows.