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
Small Press Week 2018: Monday, a look back at the Inception of ASP
We’d been talking about founding a press for a few years. I was becoming increasingly frustrated and angry about what was happening to some of the books I’d edited, and to some of my writer friends. Some of the books I worked on already had committed publishers, who knew my work and wanted me involved, and that’s great. But sometimes I was hired by a writer who had a publisher but knew they were not going to give the book a thorough edit – there is less and less of that going on these days, as you can see from opening even a big-name title. And I think — we think — that that is awful. If you are published by ASP, you get a thorough and very fine edit…
Featured Audio: “The Lovesick Lake,” a Story by James J Patterson
“Lovers of the personal essay should be rejoicing in the streets at word of this collection. For readers and acquaintances of Jimmy Patterson, it is long overdue, but the author was born in Washington, D.C., where the machinery of progress is congenitally slow. So this book, in many important ways – is what all satisfying collections of autobiographical essays should be – a mirror of place.” Rick Walter
Armistice Day, known in the US as Veteran’s Day, is now a work week past, but for James J Patterson it is a memory and idea that refuses to restrain itself to a 24 hour period. Yesterday we published his moving account of those veterans of The Great War he knew growing up, memorializing and contextualizing them for an audience whose experience of the war may only be through the muddy, pained faces in old photographs…
The World of Yesterday (Armistice Day, 2018)
My father always said that his first memory was of standing on the couch in his parent’s living room, small hands on the back cushion, peering out a picture widow at a neighborhood street in Bend, Oregon. There is a slow-moving line of cars and horse-drawn carriages inching its way down the lane. The line of cars is there every day, and every day he stands there and watches. His street is a long one and at the end of it is the cemetery. He is not allowed to go outside to play. Death is all anyone talks about. Death from a great flu epidemic. Death from a great war just ending. Everyone has lost someone. Most have lost a few. It is 1918…