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
Featured Poetry: “Winter Funeral” by Elizabeth Hazen
Fully embracing what the lyric mode does best, Hazen provides the readers with brief, intense poems that preserve a suspended moment in time, attempting to record the thought processes and emotions of the speaker much like tree rings reveal drought, heat, and age. With astonishing clarity and concision, Hazen explores the mysteries of our realities—which are ultimately beholden to entropy.
Grace Cavalieri on the Kojo Nnamdi Show Jan 23rd
Recently Governor Larry Hogan announced that Grace Cavlieri, poet, playwright, and long time host of NPR’s The Poet and The Poem, would become Maryland’s next Poet Laureate, succeeding the great Stanley Plumly. Now that she has been inaugurated, one of her first stops is The Kojo Nnamdi show. Kojo Nnamdi has been hosting his show on WAMU for 20 years, so he and Grace are kindred spirits in that regard–Grace has hosted The Poet and The Poem for over 40 years.
A Short Thought on Grace’s Interview with Jorie Graham (by Writer, Nin Andrews)
Nin Andrews is a poet. Most recently of Miss August which is out now from the awesome Cavankerry Press and most notably of the collection, Why God is a Woman. Nin Andrews is also a fan of Grace Cavalieri’s interview with Jorie Graham which she recently extolled over on ITN.