Working for corporate America is a miserable experience. Can you escape with your soul intact?

Working for corporate America is a miserable experience. Can you escape with your soul intact? Is it possible to live a creatively realized life in corporate America? A remarkable new book by a survivor of the constant corporate layoffs during the dotcom-era, "Necktie for a Two-Headed Tadpole" by Jason Murk explores the question with wit, insight and dazzling literary effect.

Presented in the style of an illustrated modern-day alchemy book, Murk’s first book examines the creative process in the context of modern corporate living. Creativity, the book makes plain, is a complex alchemy of ideas and impulses rooted in the individual’s unique spirit and experience, a reality fundamentally in conflict with the purposes and operational demands of corporate life.

"Necktie for a Two-Headed Tadpole" (ISBN: 1-4116-7681-5, $9.95) will be of help to anyone with an artistic inclination who struggles to escape from corporate America. This book makes it clear that living and dying at your job every day in corporate America is a problem. Corporate work is miserable; to call yourself a “cultural creative” or brand yourself as part of any “creative class” is to give yourself an artistic-sounding label which only distracts you from your misery. The only way to live a creatively realized life in corporate America, in fact, is to get out of corporate America.

Jason Murk has a degree in mathematics from MIT. He consulted for corporations in the United States and Canada until he moved to a remote, rural corner of New Mexico. He lives and writes “at the end of the grid” with no TV reception, no cellphone reception, no mail or newspaper delivery, no internet access and just enough water to keep life interesting. His life is also “bereft” of PowerPoint presentations, expense reports, client lunches, corporate retreats, strategic planning sessions, cost-benefit analyses, market studies, internal memos, and the obsessed preoccupation with hourly changes in stock option prices.

This book will be available in both retail and online bookstores on May 1. More information about this book, including author interviews, sample images from the book, and scheduled book tour dates, are available on http://books.thewestern.net