Hardly Working: A Semi-Auto Fiction

New Semi-Auto Fiction from Caleb Caudell, author of The Neighbor (shortlisted in the Indiana Author's Awards 2022). Hardly Working follows (very) hard-working stiff Caleb through dead-end jobs, dead-end relationships, bodily failures, and collapsing apartments amid the cultural ruins of the Rust Belt all with his trademark humour and determination to avoid comfortable despair. Among many other felicities, Hardly Working garnishes your latte with a hatchet to the forehead, solves the riddle of time and reverse engineers the need for God.

I shouldn’t even call them days. It suggests an unreal unity. A day lurches from moment to moment and never meets itself. Gone before it arrives, sliding past its seconds. They call them seconds because there’s no firsts; time is imaginary addition, a recounting. The original experience missing.

"As if Graham Greene worked at Denny's." -Gil Gildner