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

Exquisite by September

Hawkins, Shayla

Poetry

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

In twenty-five short stories, Andrea Rinard introduces an eclectic group of women attempting to claim their own space and to find meaning in the mundanity of relationships, eating, shopping, grieving, searching, and dropping a kid off at college. Stark, spare, sometimes surreal, but always lit with a spark of truth, these stories are at once amusing and infuriating, comforting and heartbreaking, and always familiar.

Murmurations

Rinard, Andrea

Welcome to the world of Ray Trotter, where ordinary humans are pushed to do things in out-of-the-ordinary ways. Trotter has conjured a world of Southern hyper-reality inAnd Dogs to Chase Them, his first book of short stories: a good Christian woman who has had enough and so pushes a man down the staircase, "as final as flushing the commode;" a concrete deliveryman who really ought to have double checked the address before he got out of his truck; and a man who man enacts his revenge on the self-declared Queen of the Post Office. But there is much more to these stories than humor, for Trotter has the rare gift to show us the interior lives of people trying to do the best they can, and the often tragic consequences do not dampen our admiration for their best intentions. Trotter treats his characters with honest empathy, and the result is a deeply felt connection to the hopes and memories of our fellow human beings. Through a keen eye for detail and language, Trotter brings to life a world that is at once familiar and deeply odd, and creates characters that stay with a reader long after the book is closed.\nTrotter's first book has gathered praise from master storytellers: 
Ron Rash, author of Serena, Nothing Gold Can Stay, and The Caretaker, calls And Dogs To Chase Them "a collection that is at times laugh-out loud funny and other times deeply poignant." 
George Singleton, author of The Curious Lives of Non-Profit Martyrs and The Half-Mammals of Dixie, says "These are everyday, mostly blue-collar, characters, putting up good fights, skeptical of their situations, and true to their beliefs." Sybil Baker, author of Apparitions and Immigration Essays, says "Set in North Georgia and East Tennessee, these stories sparkle with insight into what it means to be human in a world that is often unforgiving but offers hope."

And Dogs to Chase Them

Trotter, Ray

United States

The day before Robert died was an otherwise perfect June day in Connecticut: warm but not hot, with a bit of a breeze, flawless blue sky, puffy white clouds-the sort of weather a sailor loves, and Robert was a sailor.\nSo begins Tara Kelly's moving memoir of her life with Robert Willis, her husband, father of their children, restauranteur, sailor, bon vivant, and alcoholic. From an enchanted start in Manhattan to a townhouse in Brooklyn, from an island in Maine and back to rural Connecticut, in fast cars, sleek boats, and on horseback, Tara and Robert seemed to live a charmed life. But beneath the glittering exterior was the struggle of money, alcohol, and ultimately self-control and hard-won sobriety. When this couple seems to have reached an impasse, separation brings renewed love, and then tragedy brings new challenges.\nTara Kelly's memoir is a clear-eyed excavation of the lives lived together and apart by two charismatic modern Americans, a story told in love and compassion for herself and others, a story "...never unsympathetic, and refreshingly free from sentimentality and the temptation to settle old scores" (Michael Korda). A story readers will savor and remember.

No Last Words

Biographies & Memoirs

Kelly, Tara

Community & Culture

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Eastover Press LLC publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Eastover Press LLC