Matthew Vollmer

Search for a word or phrase in this book …

Biographical note:  Matthew Vollmer’s work has appeared in such journals as Paris Review, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, Epoch, and Colorado Review. He is currently at work on a novel.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714735
ISBN:  9781844714735
Author:  Matthew Vollmer
Title:  Future Missionaries of America
Series:  Salt Modern Fiction
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  FNB
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Feb-10
Extent:  200pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  12 mm
Weight:  300 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Rights:  World
Not for sale:  US
Not for sale:  CA

Short description/annotation:  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.

Main description:  The short stories in Matthew Vollmer’s infectious debut collection include a gambling addict who distractedly tries to support his son's attempt at an extreme world record, a widow seeking solace in the family lake house who instead finds her son with another man, and an inept pair of home economics students who struggle to repair their damaged robot baby.

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 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.

Table of contents:
Oh Land Of National Paradise, How Glorious Are Thy Bounties
Two Women
The Digging
Man-O’-War
The Gospel Of Mark Schneider
Second Home
Freebleeders
Straightedge
Stewards Of The Earth
Bodies
Will & Testament
Future Missionaries Of America

View excerpt as PDF:

Click here to view a sample (103 KB)

Excerpt from book:  

Future Missionaries of America

It’s sleeting on Valentine’s Day. I’m in the back booth of the Franklin Street McDonald’s, waiting for Melashenko to deliver the robotic baby we’re supposed to keep from suffering the slings and arrows of an unhappy infanthood, and writing him a letter on a napkin with the emergency topless ballpoint I keep in a hole in the lining of my hoodie. I write a I. in the corner of the first napkin and below that the date, February 14, 2003. I consider adding a little arrow-pierced heart, but I don’t want to conjure even the smallest of question marks in Melashenko’s head, so instead I draw a phantom heart in the air above the paper, which only confirms that I should definitely not draw it for real and that hearts are even more dangerous than sentimental closing signatures like Love or Love ya or Yours, any of which could inspire Melashenko to think I might think or even hope that we’re anything more than we are. So, potentially disastrous heart drawing averted, I begin the letter, as usual, with Dear Melashenko (his first name’s David but I use his last because I like the way it sounds, plus it ensures that I maintain a certain level of formality). Ten minutes later I’ve scribbled seven napkins’ worth of words, which I roll into a floppy scroll. I snap a hair band around the middle and draw the letters of his name down the side in the Gothiest font I can muster, to give it this look like it might’ve been written by an ancient scribe, one who’d dreamed of future devastations and consigned them to this fragile parchment, to be delivered on this date to the father of a baby who’s never been born.


Melashenko’s been my project since French II. My job? To school him re reality. The first few weeks of class, we didn’t talk, despite the fact that he sat right in front of me. I assumed that because he wore Izod and Polo and never once turned around to say bonjour that he was a stuck-up a-hole?—?a dude who had a Carolina-blue brick road paved straight to a frat-house date rape. When Madame Jacques called on him to recite dialogue, he pronounced every word in an impeccable French accent, which immediately made me think, okay, maybe he’s gay. But one day, I arrived early to set up my class project (I was in charge of assembling an authentic French cafe, complete with a red and white checkered tablecloth, espresso, Nutella, baguettes, and a CD of accordion music) and there was Melashenko, in his regular seat, scribbling furiously on a semitransparent sheet of air mail stationery. I was like, What’s the deal, are we writing letters to French kids now and he said, No, I’m writing to a friend in Ivory Coast, West Africa. No way, I said, that’s cool, is the person African and if so how did you meet him and he said it’s a she, her parents are missionaries, and I’ve been writing her for the past five years. He explained that his church had this magazine for kids called Junior Guide and that every week they listed the names of potential pen pals, along with their hobbies and interests, and when he saw that hers were horses and drawing and piano and pizza, and that she lived in Abidjan, he decided on a whim to write and then it was just like they hit it off as friends and have been exchanging one a week, which, he explained, is sometimes hard because you don’t feel like you have much to say, but when that happens you just think up a string of weird and?/?or funny questions to ask.

This forced me to reconsider my initial assessment of Melashenko. Why would a religious dork spritzing himself with Drakkar Noir masquerade as a douche bag? What did he write in his letters? What did he receive? I needed an answer. So, during our next class period, as we suffered through another outdated French in Action video, I slid him a note of my own.

Review quote:  This debut short story collection unveils the subtle beauty in raw grief and general disappointment with being. Vollmer plays with absurdity, the loneliness of daily existence, and the importance of taking chances. Nine of the dozen stories have appeared in journals and magazines, but the collection maintains a natural cohesion, with terrifically dark but strangely sweet characters and plotlines. One centers on a deadbeat dad who, while visiting his straightedge son (a rising X Games star), is forced to come to terms with his self-disappointment. In another, a recent widow takes an impromptu retreat to the family lake house, only to discover her estranged son sequestered with an unfamiliar man. The title piece is narrated by a teenaged punk atheist, Alex, who has developed a crush on her staunchly Christian best friend and home economics partner, David Melashanko. Though the two share every surreptitious desire and potential misdeed, Alex is heartbroken to learn that Melashenko has been keeping a secret. Vollmer masters distinct personalities and surprising plots, writing deftly from many points of view, but in most cases the story ends just as the reader becomes invested.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly

Review quote:  Vollmer's irresistible first collection offers a large cast of yearning characters: some lonely, some lost, some in love and some who, landing on the other side of life's devastations … now find their grief restive and revolting. Emotions may be inexpressible in these stories, but they do find expression, if not through words then through actions. … Vollmer writes with equal dexterity about teenagers and adults, men and women, atheists and believers, Goths and jocks, dropouts and doctors—less interested in getting down any particular demographic, it would seem, than in revealing the humans beneath. Expertly structured and utterly convincing, these stories represent the arrival of a strong new voice.

New York Times Book Review

Review quote:  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. He is particularly adept at depicting the thrilling experience of young love. Vollmer's narrative voice, reminiscent of T.C. Boyle, is also fully realized and very appealing-irreverent, vital, and bristling with vivid imagery and detail

Patrick Sullivan
Library Journal STARRED Review

Review quote:  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 and Big Fish

Review quote:  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; as one of his people says, ‘reverent and wild and pure and transcendent.

Stewart O’Nan, author of Snow Angels, Songs for the Missing and Poe

Review quote:  In prose that manages to be both precise and expansive, Matthew Vollmer tells compassionate stories of people forced to take action against difficult circumstances. This collection is bold and risky, written by a courageous new writer.

Chris Offutt, author of Kentucky Straight

Review quote:  There are large cracks in America, and a person can fall right down into them, and never be seen again. Many of Matthew Vollmer's characters are on the verge of doing that. Wacked-out teenagers, mountain survivalists, Adventist evangelists, compulsive gamblers, estranged mothers, Goth girls, world-class skateboarders, English department dopeheads, broken-hearted dentists, every one of them caught in the midst of an unimaginable situation, usually involving inexpressible love or grief. I have never read any stories like these. Quite often, these stories are saying the unsayable.

Lee Smith, author of The Last Girls

Review quote:  From the opening rhapsody to the final prayerful note, Matthew Vollmer's stories beautifully script the drama of a changed world in search of new words. Here you'll find the tensile strengths of realism set beside the radical innovations of experiment, the enduring power of the story reinvented for our new day. Virtuosic in its variations yet held together by a ballast of obsession, Future Missionaries of America has more range than most novels while doing brilliantly what stories do best: it deepens the mystery of others by making that mystery familiar.

Charles D'Ambrosio, author of The Point and Other Stories and The Dead Fish Museum