Excerpt From Upcoming Dave Housley Novel Hits The Rumpus
"It just all feels impossible. Pappas, who steals tape from the supply room, entire rolls of toilet paper from the bathroom closet, pens and microwave popcorn and Microsoft Word, standing here in his Dockers and Gap sweater, a millionaire? Cowens, who Robertson had to personally tell to stop saving porn to their cloud-based file storage? Mowery, with his weird Central Pennsylvania accent and his eBay store where he sells the motherboards they are supposed to be recycling, is worth eight point eight million dollars?"
In this Rumpus-exclusive excerpt from Dave Housley's upcoming novel The Other Ones, follow four of the principle characters in the novel as they discover that their detestable colleagues have become overnight millionaires. Artist, Lauren Kaelin, supplies original illustrations to accompany the excerpts.
Chastain and Craver are office friends and co-conspirators in cynicism, smoking together in the stairwell and poking fun at the fragile façade of the American office space. But, when their usual targets become recipients of one-way tickets out of daily drudgery, will they be able to sustain their cool detachment?
Robertson is a millennial a few years out of school toiling away in the company's IT department. His direct superior, Mowery, a MAGA-hat-wearing bud-light-swilling caricature of American intellectual indolence, is now a millionaire eight times over. While Chastain is already knee-deep in student loan and credit card debt, Robertson looks forward to years of honest toil and virtuous drudgery just to attain an iota of the stability Mowery has drunkenly stumbled into.
Russell is Robertson's foil, an old-timer who is long past caring about most anything other than keeping his head down and putting in whatever work he is mandated to perform.
Read about Chastain, Craver, Robertson, and Russell at The Rumpus HERE
And order The Other Ones HERE
Reflections on my First AWP; or, Sleepless in SeaTac
ASP Intern and Washington College Senior Eylie Sasajima on Her First AWP Conference
An interview with the late, great Linda Pastan
Along the indifferent corridors / of space, angels could be hiding,” Linda Pastan wrote in her poem “Muse.” ASP honors the legacy of Linda Pastan (1932–2023), a former Poet Laureate of Maryland, who passed away last week. Pastan was the author of the 2018 poetry book A Dog Runs Through It, which won the Towson University Literary Award.
Here’s to 2022! And Here’s a Sale…
2022 was a big year for ASP and our writers. In March, we had a booth at the annual AWP Conference, and our offsite reading, featuring authors Saida Agostini, Dave Housley, Elizabeth Hazen, and Richard Peabody, along with special guests Teri Ellen Cross Davis and Leslie Pietrzyk, had a standing-room-only audience packed with literary stars.