Somebody Who Knows Somebody

To call To call the prose in this book invigorating would be an understatement. Charles Rafferty's stories invite you to damn the collar and charge the invisible fence: there's a shock to the system, and then you have the freedom to move in the world that was right in front of you but somehow unexplored. The air is better on his side of the barrier, bracing and clear. I'm not sure whether one should call them stories or incendiary devices.

--Sarah Harris Wallman, author of Senseless Women, Juniper Prize for Fiction




Charles Rafferty's stories present almost recognizable scenarios: we meet a man stealing cemetery flowers to bring to his date, another presenting his neighbors with their dead cat, another pondering the arrival of peacocks to the neighborhood. Rafferty's world is just a little stranger, just a little sharper, just a little funnier than our own. After spending some time in this marvelous world, we return to our own, surprised and enlightened, ready to appreciate it anew.

--Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, W. W. Norton




Charles Rafferty is a master of the short form, and the micro-stories that make up. Somebody Who Knows Somebody are like the lights of a city that blink by your train window as you ride quickly into the night. And what lights! These stories are precise, each glimpse beautifully rendered; they are alternately funny, menacing, and are both tender toward and unforgiving of what feels like a very particular American disquiet. I loved it.

--Ethan Rutherford, author of The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories, Ecco




Whether huffing breath into the lungs of the forsaken figures of classical myth or bearing witness to the quiet desperation of threadbare neighbors of otherwise quiet exurban lanes, these brief, fierce tales strike a smack to the forehead, like a branch stretched taut and then released on a winding, wooded trail.

--Ian Morris, author of When Bad Things Happen to Rich People and Simple Machines