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Charles Rammelkamp’s short story collection Casual Mysteries And Aperçus is sparkling with wit and a cast of characters that will bring you into Elks Clubs and behind webcams. The mysteries include a suburban wife impregnated by a thirteen-year-old and the aperçus include another woman’s openness to a stranger who smells like minty soap. A range of insights populate Rammelkamp’s collection that flickers and dazzles with Americana, humility, humor, and grace.
—Denise Duhamel, author of Kinky, Scald, Pink Lady and others
In a style delightfully reminiscent of Tom Robbins, Charles Rammelkamp’s charming Casual Mysteries And Aperçus is a slice of life tale that I found hard to put down. A story told by multiple narrators living in Potawatomi Rapids, I was fascinated by the author’s dexterity in weaving together so many distinct voices, creating a concoction of small-town life that I found both funny and touching.
My favorite? The author’s depiction of Susan, the class wit, as told by Philip, her creative writing teacher. As a writer of erotica, I was impressed. “I’m talking about her writing, which cracked with sharp repartee between libidinous women and the men who desired them” … and “In her blue dress, Susan looked good enough to eat, and I fantasized licking the golden hairs on her tan forearm, sniffing along the bare skin up to her shoulder.” This is a book to be savored.
—Alexis Rhone Fancher, Author of 13 books, including Erotic: New & Selected, Brazen, and Junkie Wife
These timely, riveting stories chronicle an America of small cities and big towns. The citizens who struggle there are Elks, bartenders, middle-aged siblings still trying to be understood, college admissions officers, and policemen answering calls for help.
Lightning flashes of illumination reveal the drama hidden in their daily lives, like the identical twin who succumbs to the temptation to impersonate his brother when he runs into an old high school classmate, receiving more revelations about himself than he bargained for.
The poetry of everyday lie rises up at sudden intervals. “His future no longer the puzzle it once seemed, it was his past that stretched before him as a source of dread and discovery.”
Must-read fiction for the observer of contemporary American life.
—Roger Netzer’s poems have appeared in Green Hills Literary Lantern, Mas Tequila, Chiron, Meat For Tea, The Five-Two, Syndic, and elsewhere.
Charles Rammelkamp is surely one of the 21st Century’s most highly underrated slingers of poetry and prose. With his story collection CASUAL MYSTERIES AND APERÇUS he is at it again—hilarious, snarky, and relentlessly timely all at once. His dialogue truly sings here—the reader can’t help but be a fly on the wall. Read these stories and shake your head in wonder: Rammelkamp has done it, again!
—Nathan Leslie, author of Van Boyle, A Fly in the Ointment, The Invisible Hand and others
Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore, where he lives with his wife, Abby. Rammelkamp’s previous BlazeVOX collection, Transcendence, dealt with psychedelic drugs and yoga, an historical examination of the CIA’s covert “mind control” programs, Timothy Leary, etc. Rammelkamp is the author of several collections of “historical” or “biographical” poetry sequences, written in dramatic monologue form, including Fusen Bakudan (Time Being Books), about World War Two Japanese balloon bombs and leper colony missionaries in Vietnam; Mata Hari: Eye of the Day (Apprentice House), about the life and career of the World War I femme fatale spy; American Zeitgeist (Apprentice House), which deals with the populist politician and Scopes Trial buffoon, William Jennings Bryan; Catastroika (Apprentice House), another collection of dramatic monologues in the voices of Maria Rasputin, the mad monk’s daughter, who escaped Russia after the Revolution and became a lion tamer for Ringling Brothers, and a fictional Jewish character, Sasha Federmesser, who likewise escapes and immigrates to Baltimore. A chapbook of poems about female sailors in the British Royal Navy during the 17th and 18th centuries, Jack Tar’s Lady Parts (Main Street Rag Press), is also written in this style. His collection on Harry Houdini, A Magician Among the Spirits, winner of the Blue Light Press Poetry Prize, is another. The Tao According to Calvin Coolidge (Kelsay Books) is his most recent biographical collection. Other poetry collections include Ugler Lee, The Field of Happiness and See What I Mean? (Kelsay Books) and Mortal Coil, a chapbook published by Clare Songbirds. Another chapbook of poems, Me and Sal Paradise, was published by FutureCycle Press.
Book Information:
· Paperback: 356 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-548-9
$22
