Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jan 2009
250 pages
Genre: Short Stories
Publication Information
Published simultaneously in hardcover and paperback.
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 lakehouse, Vollmer’s twelve stories are at once sorrowful, exuberant, and absurdly comical.
"Starred Review. Vollmer's impressive first book is a rare and gratifying achievement: a superbly written collection of short stories. Vollmer writes with great wisdom and insight about love, sex, and loss .... [a] narrative voice, reminiscent of T.C. Boyle..." - Library Journal.
"The characters who inhabit the hilarious, heartbreaking stories in Future Missionaries of America may be desperate; yet, for all their lost innocence, they have the capacity to celebrate life’s joy and pain. At its best, Matthew Vollmer's writing bursts with a kind of ecstatic poetry." - Stewart O'Nan, author of Songs for the Missing and other books.
"Matthew Vollmer has a written a book that looks like America: it's big, funny, sad and hopeful; its ambition is to take over the world. I'm behind it one hundred per cent." - Daniel Wallace, author of Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician.
This information about Future Missionaries of America was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Matthew Vollmer's work has appeared in Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Epoch, Tin House, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Antioch Review, Portland Review, Confrontation, Salt Hill, Fugue, PRISM International, and New Letters. His work has been twice short-listed for the Best American Short Stories series, and he has been nominated numerous times for the Pushcart Prize.
He teaches in the English Department at Virginia Tech, where he also advises graduate teaching assistants in the composition program. He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.
The Stone Home
by Crystal Hana Kim
A moving family drama and coming-of-age story revealing a dark corner of South Korean history.
The House on Biscayne Bay
by Chanel Cleeton
As death stalks a gothic mansion in Miami, the lives of two women intertwine as the past and present collide.
The Funeral Cryer by Wenyan Lu
Debut novelist Wenyan Lu brings us this witty yet profound story about one woman's midlife reawakening in contemporary rural China.
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
