Author: Jamie Spencer

About the Author:
Jamie Spencer, a St. Louis native, is a retired high-school English teacher and community college professor. He has written book and music reviews for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and serves as a book reviewer for the Missouri Historical Society's Gateway Magazine and Washington University'sA Common Reader.

Modified Raptures is his first romantic novel. An earlier non-fiction book, Fictional Religion, is a set of essays that identify important religious themes to be found in great literature, from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Larkin and Faulkner.

He's a volunteer with the St. Louis Symphony and with the Opera Theater of St. Louis, along with teaching a variety of Adult Education classes, on English religious poetry, and on Shakespeare, Milton and Larkin. He lives with his wife Anna Ahrens, a private school History teacher, in Des Peres, Missouri, a St. Louis suburb.

About the Book:

This novel, set mainly in St. Louis Missouri (tho' occasionally in outer space), tries to capture the romantic lives of young people today. Boys date boys, girls girls, along with the (somewhat more prevalent) girls and boys. The book explores the often fluid nature of one's sexual identity and preferences and how they can affect one's romantic commitments. Some key scenes play out in several of the St. Louis region's historic events and institutions—Lewis and Clark's exploration, the 1904 World's Fair, Cardinal baseball. Another site is Washington University. That educational setting offers the chance to trace the fascinating ways in which ideas are planted, take hold, and then spread far and wide. Above all, Modified Raptures dramatizes in detail the ways time's irresistible demands can shape (or doom) human relationships, careers and lives.