In January 2009, my first book, Future Missionaries of America, will be published in the U.S. by MacAdam Cage and in the UK, Europe, and Australia by Salt Publishing.

Here’s a description (from MacAdam Cage):

“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.”

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

"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."

From Lee Smith, author of Fair & Tender Ladies and The Devil's Dream:

“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.”

From Daniel Wallace, author of Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician and Big Fish:

"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."

From Chris Offutt, author of Kentucky Straight and Out of the Woods:

"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."

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

“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.”

Read a longer description here.

Pre-order it here.