Coming Soon: Drop and Add, a novel

This book will be published August 2024. Advanced copies are now available for review.

Think Richard Russo, Straight Man, only a new prof rather than an old one, an adjunct rather than a full prof, at a rural two-year school called Eastern Technical College (yup, ETC) not a private liberal arts college. In addition to trying to establish his place in the institution, Eliot Becker also tries to find his place in the one-stoplight town where he takes up residence, living above the drug store, bagging groceries at the local grocery store for extra money, singing in an all-falsetto band at a country bar for extra money. There are potential love interests, of course, the woman still living down in Detroit, trained to be an art historian, working as a tennis pro, and the new one, who happens to be the small town’s female plumber. It’s fun stuff and it’s serious business, taking the reader inside the gritty context of adjunct work–bad pay, no security, shitty hours, ill-prepared working class students for many of whom failure is not just an option, it’s a virtual certainty. What kind of prof did this protagonist expect to become? What kind of man? What will he become?