Future Missionaries of America
By Matthew Vollmer
August 21, 2008ISBN: 978-1-59692-312-6
Format: Genre: Fiction Pages: 250
Price: $24.00 Rights: World (excluding Europe/UK) Other Rights: Matthew Vollmer
Awards: ∑ Five of Matthew Vollmer’s stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
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About the Book
Reader’s Choice Simultaneous Paperback ReleaseISBN-10: 1-59692-313-X / ISBN-13: 978-1-59692-313-3 U.S. $13.00
Offering a witty and moving portrayal of American loneliness and hope, and presenting an unforgettable cast of characters, the stories in Matthew Vollmer’s Future Missionaries of America expose the raw vulnerability of the human heart.
A waiter at Yellowstone National Park seeks consolation in the arms of his dead friend's girlfriend. A young woman vacationing in Idaho becomes obsessed with a female poet and her adopted child. A deadbeat bus-driver with a gambling addiction watches his son attempt the impossible at the X Games. A widow, retreating to a New Hampshire lake house, finds her son living there with another man. A temp in New York City distributes his will and testament to twenty-seven strangers, hoping to convince one of them to be its executor.
These are just some of the compellingly odd characters found in the pages of Matthew Vollmer’s brilliant debut collection, Future Missionaries of America. Taking us from a Seventh Day Adventist boarding school to a traveling exhibition of plasticine bodies, from the moonlit paths of Yellowstone National Park to a quiet New Hampshire lake house, Vollmer’s twelve stories are at once sorrowful, exuberant, and absurdly comical.
About the Author
Matthew Vollmer is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and currently teaches at Virginia Tech University, in Blacksburg, Virginia. His stories have been published in the Paris Review, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Future Missionaries of America is his first book."Author's Website