Matthew Vollmer

Gateway to Paradise: Stories Matthew Vollmer

Publisher Marketing: In these gritty, imaginative stories set in the mountains and small towns of the South often in motels, theme parks, or resorts men and women find themselves at the mercy of an inspiration gone wrong: a man on a tryst is seduced by a ghost; a woman conducts a test to discover who is her true best friend her husband or her dog; a beleaguered young writing professor goes one step too far while chaperoning the famous writer he finds darkly alluring. In the title story, an ex-high-school basketball player living an uneventful life in her small hometown as a cashier helps her boyfriend rob a lottery winner, and finds herself on an epic journey of fear, deceit, and betrayal." Contributor Bio:  Vollmer, Matthew Matthew Vollmer is the author of Future Missionaries of America, a collection of stories, as well as Inscriptions for Headstones, a collection of essays. He is the editor of A Book of Uncommon Prayer, which collects invocations from over sixty acclaimed and emerging authors, and with David Shields is co-editor of Fakes; An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, Found Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts. His work has appeared in a range of anthologies and magazines, including The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, Epoch, Best American Essays and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. He directs the undergraduate creative writing program at Virginia Tech.