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
Earth Day Reflections: To See for the First Time
“Our communications are profuse and immediate, as is our consciousness of the interrelationship of all that exists. We’ve seen what we often leave in our wake—homeless populations, spoiled wilderness. We can see the way the decisions and investments that we make, here, everyday, can effect just how much milk a baby in Uganda gets. Our world is a teeming, mysterious, multi-cultural mousetrap of a place where everything seems to hinge on something else. We share a new concept of this planet as a finite space, dense, and more difficult than ever to navigate. We live in an environment fraught with hazard, and it is important to have good guides, guides with insight—those who tread softly.”
Joanna Biggar’s Picks for NPM (Week 3)
Week three of National Poetry Month is here and we are still celebrating! So as the champagne continues relentlessly foaming for party-goers catching their tipsy mid-air, we asked author, Joanna Biggar, to select three poems she thinks are worthy of applause between wassails.
James J. Patterson’s Picks for NPM (week 2)
In honor of National Poetry Month, We asked author and essayist extraordinaire, James J. Patterson, to select three poems he’d like to see celebrated. Along with Walt Whitman’s “On the Beach at Night Alone” (featured above), he chose Wordsworth’s “The World is too much with Us”, And Last but not least, the famed American Poet Robert Bly performing the poem “On Being a Man” by the famed Spanish poet, Antonio Machado.