- Paperback: 54 pages
- Publisher: Bamboo Dart Press (April 25, 2025)
“The spirit of my father was trapped inside my ballpoint pen,” Robert Scotellaro starts one of his truly delightful new stories. “Must have slipped in when I was changing the refill.” Hilarious, inventive, audacious, Scotellaro’s quick fictions pack a real punch, whether they involve a Peruvian language based on the word “llama,” or a guy in a Fat Elvis band being dumped by his girlfriend for somebody in a Skinny Johnny Cash band. And that father whose spirit is trapped in a fountain pen? Surely not the same father whose wife takes his temper in for an ultrasound, dragging their son along. Robert Scotellaro’s wit and creativity are all over the thirty-two gems that make up From the Book of Atmospheres.
—Charles Rammelkamp, author of Presto and The Trapeze of Your Flesh
There is an ethereal, almost otherworldly, quality about Scotellaro’s surreal collection of micro stories. One story is a tale about a woman whose husband is possessed by a “cliché demon” and speaks only in timeworn platitudes. Yet another, a political parable of our time, rues the day when the meek finally do inherit the earth and vengefully vent their long-simmering resentments. Throughout this fabulous book, Scotellaro illuminates the odd and the mysterious by deftly plumbing, in ever-so-brief fictions, the atmospheres that envelop the incongruous and offbeat dimensions of the real. From the Book of Atmospheres is a masterwork.