The last few years have seen two very good novels about office life, Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End and Ed Park’s Personal Days. (Also, one very good British television program and one occasionally very good, David Foster Wallace-admiring American knock-off television program have appeared, too.)

If you have felt that all of those things have been lacking in a thick coat of misanthropy and violence—besides the thick coat of misanthropy and violence that some see as inherent to capitalism in the first place—Future Tense Publishing has just released a little chapbook called Our Beloved 26th that should satisfy your desires quite nicely.

I saw Kevin Sampsell yesterday*, and he handed me a copy of the book, and told me the author, Riley Michael Parker, is quiet and shy and young. Apparently—happily, really—the young man has some issues.

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