3 American Cranks: A Satire in Three Voices

by R L Feliciello

Overview

America is downtown earth and will not be ignored. Yet the question lingers: the last best hope of earth or the land that Satan blessed? 3 American Cranks takes you on a satirical roller coaster tour of the best and worse of the Land of the Free and the Homeless and, when that breathless ride comes to a sudden stop and you wobble away, you will be primed to give forth an opinion of your own on the matter, if you are not too dizzy.

Three eccentric American outsiders bare their souls and air outlandish opinions about personal sanity in today's America gone haywire. An irreverent satirical romp, shying away neither from the underside nor the persistent promise of America.

Laughter rings out on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial when street preacher/soapbox orator D. C. Washington steps up to transform the lunchtime crowd into his congregation and delivers a string of delightfully outrageous sermonettes on life and love in America under the reign of the One Percent.

Meanwhile at the rear of the congregation a shy, sex-starved college freshman is thrilled to discover that the distant brunette standing just inches away is, like him, holding a copy of Edgar Allan Poe's The Philosophy of Furniture. So begins a madcap mix of all-in-their-heads courtship and all-out war between the sexes, interwoven with the witty truth-telling of D. C. Washington on race in America, Wall Street, Inequality, the disappearing Muddled Class, and the need to Declare Your Independence.

On his way to explaining why the black man is the only 100% American, the street preacher/soapbox orator declares, "Hello, my fellow slaves. We used to pick cotton now we pick dollars, and the necktie is the new shackle. My name is D. C. Washington, and I cannot tell a lie."

The college freshman confesses his titanic failures to break the ice with the opposing sex. "The trouble with females is they are not thinking about sex all the time."

A young brunette of bristling intelligence lambasts the fraud of male superiority. "Marriage? I refuse to spend my days as a trophy wife in a trophy case, gathering dust. I believe I can do more with my intelligence than pair socks."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780997411706
Publisher:	Pazziboy Press
Publication date:	04/18/2016
Pages:	172
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

R. L. Feliciello was born in Mt. Vernon, New York, grew up in El Sereno, California, on the east side of Los Angeles, and attended university in San Francisco and graduate schools at UCLA and Hunter College in Manhattan. He has worked as a journalist, a publishing executive, an actor, a teacher of English as a second language in Rome, and a clinical social worker at the Bedford Stuyvesant Family Center, as well as private and municipal psychiatric hospitals treating the severely mentally ill. The author is a member of PEN/AMERICA. He lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS
1.
Trialogue 1 Hello and Hello 3
Einstein Never Wore Socks
This Wifeless Planet

Trialogue 2 Vice President of the United States 19
Conjugal Visits
The Elect and The Elected

Trialogue 3 Secret Love
Queen of the Laundromat 33
The Formula for Success

Trialogue 4 Into the Maëlstrom 49
The Wrong House by Mistake
The Only Rigid Body in Nature

2.

Trialogue 5 The American ZZ-ZZ Fly 61
A Blonde and a Banknote
Master, Eat

Trialogue 6 What Is She Thinking Right Now? 77
A Moderately Large Idaho Potato
Aunt Bertha's Toes

Trialogue 7 Hail, Realdo Colombo 89
Where's My White Rabbit?
Rule, Britannia!

Trialogue 8 Glittering Indifference 99
Find a Nice Man
King Me!

3.

Trialogue 9 500,000 Applicants 115
Jesus's Goat
Is the Lord Your Shepherd?

Trialogue 10 When An American Prays 129
Philistia Is Just Over the Hill
A Bull and a Bullfinch

Trialogue 11 Leave Your Bootstraps Alone 137
The Things That Are Caesar's
The Index of Covetability

Trialogue 12 This Barren Autogamy 149
I'm Staying Right Here
Declare Your Independence

Editorial Reviews

Timely and absolutely unique, the result of mixing the DNA of Fred Sanford, Authur Rimbaud and Henry Miller. ...worthy of a high place on the literary totem pole. Studded with gems so striking, insightful, and hilarious they can stand with the best of Mark Twain.
Jason Rosette, author of 10,000 Miles to Go, writer-director, Bookwars

The First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech was established for a reason. This book may be it. Seriously comically sexy and biblical at the same time. D.C. Washington is a 21st century Will Rogers.
Nicholas Howard, singer-songwriter, God Is in the City

This work is genius. 3 American Cranks is one of the most singular and compelling novels I've seen come out of the United States in years, a poignantly original, brave, top-rank book. Once I started this novel I had to struggle to put it down and couldn't help but get right back to it. What was pulling me back was the pleasure of the prose, with plenty an exquisite passage. I was putting check marks beside passages that struck me as particularly eloquent, and some pages were cluttered with checkmarks. The prose, the characters, the daring, all propelled me right up to the breathless ending of D. C. Washington's final speech. When I came to that beautiful final sentence, I had to sit back as if I had come to a sudden halt of an intellectual rollercoaster. The timing, the nuances, the humor, all work together to make one solid comic masterpiece, right there alongside Aristophanes, Rabelais, Swift, and Philip Roth's satiric pieces. There is throughout an outstanding spontaneity, a sparkling freshness that one finds only in the best work. The author has tapped right down to the deepest riches of self and soul and pulled up a shining treasure, tapping into that rareness and beauty within and provided it to the rest of us, the mark of that thing called genius.
Lantzey Miller, author of City Limit

From the Publisher