Ranging from third person accounts to essays in the form of notes, instructions, and extended meditations, this collection of creative nonfiction unfurls like an idiosyncratic playlist of the possibilities available to the writer of creative nonfiction.\nThe title essay tells the story of Vollmer's growing up in rural North Carolina, and catalogs the psychological pressures exerted by a religion that, while all-consuming for the author, seemed invisible to the rest of the world.\nWritten using a variety of forms and points of view, these immersive, voice-driven essays are a testament to the dexterity of the form: 
- An essay in the form of instructions for how to write a love story centers on two young star-crossed lovers at a Seventh-day Adventist boarding school. 
- A story of a trip to a mountain home built to resemble a castle reveals a secret underground bunker that houses tens of thousands of dollars' worth of Nazi militaria. 
- An essay written in the form of notes takes stock of forbidden music. 
- At the story of a husband and wife who take a walk after dark, encounter a spectacular cosmic phenomenon, and return home to discover a distraught child. 
- An investigation into NASA's Symphonies of the Planets, an album of electromagnetic impulses emitted by various planets, which was transformed into sound waves, occasions an extended meditation on space, music, and the meaning of sound. 
- An eyewitness account of the aftermath of the shooting at Virginia Tech considers the surreal and sorrowful reactions to an unfathomable violence. 
- In another essay, a preoccupation with his inevitable death causes Vollmer to imagine who his wife might remarry, and the cataloguing of his potential replacement's superior characteristics and preoccupations creates a kind of portrait in reverse. 
- An essay that unfolds in a single paragraph recounts the house of Vollmer's best friend, which has since been razed, and becomes a requiem for the loss of a childhood filled with Nerf footballs, a farting dog, Intelevision track pads, and an obsession with finding hidden messages in rock music. 
- A retelling of a trip with his family to visit his parents in their mountain home over Thanksgiving becomes an occasion to grieve a recent miscarriage, while dramatizing peculiar family dynamics and bearing witness to the beginning stages of a mother's early onset dementia.

This World is Not Your Home

Literature & Fiction

Matthew Vollmer

Essays & Correspondence

Eastover Press LLC

In her award-winning collection, YOU HAVE REACHED YOUR DESTINATION, author Louise Marburg captures turning points in the lives of twelve disparate women. Marburg's crisp, clear-eyed prose, infused with dark humor, reveals the inevitable collapse of pretension beneath the struggles of loneliness, death, and the all too human need to be seen. From a pre-teen attempting to understand her father's suicide to a ninety-year-old caught in shadows of past marital abuse, each of these women is made to confront the reality that change is the only certainty. This collection, Marburg's finest yet, invites us to face ourselves and our own life journeys with sympathy, humor, and courage.

You Have Reached Your Destination

Marburg, Louise

Literary

Hidden Cargoes

Arthur, Chris

Until All You See Is Sky is a report from the front lines of a first-generation American life: growing up as the outsider, parenting without a clue, and persevering in plague times. From the vital meaning of Stan Smiths at the Payless Shoes in his Tampa childhood to what you should have ordered at the now-closed best bakery in Manhattan, from a childhood as a first-generation Greek-Cuban boy who has never lived in Greece or Cuba to being a modern parent wondering how to negotiate life in a pandemic, George Choundas has a story to tell. This award-winning author of short stories now turns to nonfiction, telling true stories with playful language and engaging wit. He sits in the lobby of the Boston Parker House Hotel at dawn to write and imagines what is going on in every head but his own; he survives in a elementary new school by means of The Illiad; he imagines the ends of all the near-strangers who populate our lives; and he wanders through Midtown Manhattan mapping the geography of its idiosyncratic but thoroughly intriguing denizens and visitors with the eye of an expert anthropologist of everyday life. These are the best sort of essays-full of unforgettable characters rendered with clarity and compassion by an inventive and imaginative writer at the top of his form.

Until All You See Is Sky

Humor & Entertainment

Choundas, George

Humor

Richard LeBlond has had quite a life-he's been stranded on a Montana mountaintop, chased by a bear in Labrador, splashed through torrential downpours to document the unsuccessful mating game of the spadefoot toad, crossed a union picket line as a teenager in Oregon, and wrangled errant lovers on a Cape Cod dune as a park ranger. LeBlond travels across North America with his eyes and ears open, and reports in these essays with clarity and humor on the natural world and the two- and four-legged animals who inhabit it. His wit and compassion for the foibles and blessings of being human shine through in each chapter. He also shares what he has learned about the supportive role writing can play in the aging process.

Homesick for Nowhere

LeBlond,Richard

Travel

Exquisite by September

Hawkins, Shayla

Poetry

The EastOver Anthology of Rural Stories

Outside the Frame

Childress, Catherine Pritchard

Joseph Bathanti's THE ACT OF CONTRITION & OTHER STORIES, a series of linked stories and one novella, continues the adventures of Fritz Sweeney and his outrageously memorable parents, Travis and Rita, that began in Bathanti's earlier award-winning volume of stories, THE HIGH HEART. Spanning the mid-fifties to the mid-seventies, in an Italian American working class neighborhood in Pittsburgh, THE ACT OF CONTRITION celebrates and complicates the operatic glories and tragedies of an offbeat family that, fashioned from the vault of explosive family secrets, is snared in its own incendiary mythology. These fourteen unforgettable stories - a mélange of incantatory magical realism and clear-eyed documentary precision (in the vein of Raymond Carver) - are narrated by Fritz in a prophetic voice that issues at once from the very aggregate of steel town Pittsburgh and his deep yearning to escape it.

The Act of Contrition and Other Stories

Bathanti, Joseph

"Imagine finding that message in a bottle you always dreamed about." So writes Paul Yoon, author of Snow Hunters, about poet and essayist Ralph Sneeden's new book The Legible Element.\nAlthough a memoir at its core, The Legible Element is much more: the book gathers lyrical essays into chapters, using prose and poetry as facets of the same aqueous gem. With a personal immersion in literature, visual art, film, and music, Sneeden establishes a nonfiction hybrid on the border between the academic and the personal. The collection's narratives about surfing, sailing, fishing, scuba diving, and swimming are earthly dispatches from an ongoing voyage fueled by joy, longing, loss, and humor.\nThe Legible Element is a book about places, its insights and descriptions spurred by the challenge of distinguishing the personalities of different bodies of water through experience while also paying tribute to the coasts that cradle and define them. The collection's regional touchstones are in New England and California, but as Jennifer Acker, author of The Limits of the World and editor of The Common, puts it, "This book will fling you from shore to sea and back again in search of perfect aquatic moments."\nWater provides the language of the essays, functioning as both a lens and mirror for the author's exploration of the act and outcomes of writing itself. As he says in the preface, "...it's writing that ultimately needs to rip its own temporary swath, churn the surface of memory into something that seems more permanent." Bill Roorbach, author of Summers with Juliet, Temple Stream, and Lucky Turtle, writes, "These are a poet's sentences, a poet noticing the world even as he lives in it, language creating a world apart. These essays are profound-you'll want to follow this voice wherever it goes."\nThe Legible Element will have you wallowing, floundering, and then swimming happily for your life off the shore of your own preoccupations before you even realize you're adrift.

The Legible Element: essays

Sneeden, Ralph

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