Ethan Hauser
Workspace 2009-2010
Ethan Hauser has published short stories in Esquire, Playboy, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, and New Stories From the South: The Year’s Best. He has also written nonfiction for The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Slate, and The New York Observer. A winner of a Nelson Algren award, he has held residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony.
Excerpt from The Sound of Helicopters
Proud locals dismissed them as leaf peepers—locals whose anger was tinged with jealousy, and occasionally spiraled into bitter, ugly confrontations in restaurants and diners. The mug shots on the evening news told the story: contrition and will, the divide of wealth. Two things impossible to solve: money and love. They will dog us until we die, and the headstones chiseled with names and dates and phrases from the Bible can’t tell even a fraction of the story. No quantity of either is ever enough, nor does zero yield happiness. Religion and lies guide and blind the zealots, while the ungentle, those wired neither right nor long for this world, write history, short-circuit hope, gratitude, security.
