When I was fourteen, a cousin of mine angered a Malignant One. It was a big case, a genuine scandal. Maybe you remember it. At the time, when it ended, I just wanted to forget about the whole thing. But a couple of years have passed and I guess maybe it's time to think about it again.

Thus begins Ellen Pierson's story of how she helped her cousin Paul contend with the Malignant One running a temp agency in the office building where he worked.

Ellen's story is a bright and moving tale set in the same fabulous, fantastic America as that of Rachel Pollack's award-winning Unquenchable Fire. Funny and frantic, poignant and powerful, Temporary Agency is an enduring fable from a writer whose work, in the words of Orson Scott Card, "like a river in flood, resists the well-channeled ways, cutting its own channel through the fictional terrain."