Cecil Bothwell Books

Cottage cheese and ketchup? You betcha. We'll not soon forget that good ol' Ronnie Reagan asserted that ketchup qualified as a vegetable, thereby making school lunches healthy! But ketchup on cottage cheese is merely the launch pad for this round of short stories from one of America's most prolific scribes. There's a barkeeper named Adam digging a tunnel under the city, a woman whose school counselor recommended "drug kingpin" after she took an aptitude test, seemingly sentient robotic vacuums, thinky thoughts Jesus mulls while he shaves, and much, much more. There's the Angle looking homeward, a fellow with a fishing problem and another whose job and place of employ completely disappeared overnight!

A collection of 49 short stories both thought provoking and humorous by the author of 7 previous collections, bringing his astonishing and somewhat inscrutable total to somewhere on the north side of 300 tales!

Bothwell's 5th collection of slightly out-of-kilter short stories, these all aimed at the obvious. Oh, and teeth. Lots of stuff about teeth-gnawing, grinding, biting, chattering, wisdom, etc. And cavities. And a dentist. You never know, you know?

A title Pink Floyd fans can sing along with! "Seize you on the dark side of the moo!" We start with an electrician with a get-rich-quick idea for a recipe book who falls for a woman with a yoga mat and goats and ends up more or less inheriting a dairy farm when she shifts gears and runs off with her lady love. You can't do better than that, right? Or how about the young man on a farm who actually finds a needle in a haystack and becomes something like the Johnny Appleseed of Afghani weed? Oh, and the after-story of the woman who met her soldier-boy in Clarksville in that fateful Monkee's tune about the last train? These stories are "made up" as all fiction must be, but this volume is packed full of facts. Did you know, for just an instance, that the train depot in Clarksville is no longer where it was then? Oh, no. It was jacked up and moved some miles and today is a restaurant! That's the kind of thing not many writers of top-notch stuff pass along to readers! Ah, and speaking of Pink Floyd, where else will you find a "lunar tick in the grass?"

This is the author's 7th outing in the Elysian Fields of short fiction. My goodness, what fun! Every tale in this collection involves a break of some sort or another that redounds to the protagonist's benefit. The victims/beneficiaries range from an archaeologist who loses a leg while tumbling into an Olmec cave, to the author whose grade school broken arm was the height of his young success, to an artiste in France who's scheme to poison a competitor falls through thanks to ... but, no, let's not give away the store this soon. Bones, marriages, rives, cleaves, disruptions ... oh gosh, lots more ... all lead to one or another of life's little happy dances. Twenty-seven gleeful disconnections packed into 200 pages. Oh, my!