Books published by publisher M P Publishing Limited (24 May 2012)

As the popular Blue Moon Café series moves into its third volume, The Alumni Grill showcases award-winning veterans from the first two Blue Moon Café collections, handpicked by editors William Gay and Suzanne Kingsbury.In this stunning anthology of Southern prose and poetry, beloved authors such as Tom Franklin, Suzanne Hudson, and Brad Watson take us from the Deep South of Alabama, through backcountry Mississippi, to the hills of Appalachia. We feel the aftermath of murder, marvel at motherhood, taste sumptuous Southern cooking, stay out all night fishing, and ache from lost love. For fans of the Blue Moon Café series and anyone who loves short fiction, The Alumni Grill highlights the endlessly rich and varied voices of the South.

“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.”Library Journal Starred Review“Matthew Vollmer has 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“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.”Stewart O’Nan, author of Snow Angels, Songs for the Missing and Poe“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“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“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 skate?boarders, 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 GirlsBIO: Matthew Vollmer is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and currently teaches at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. His stories have been published in the Paris Review, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Future Missionaries of America is his first book.

The Alumni Grill Anthology of Southern Writers has grown out of Sonny Brewer's Southern Writers Reading series in Fairhope, Alabama, and is the companion volume to Brewer's Stories from the Blue Moon Café, now in its fourth year. This year's Grill features twelve Blue Moon veterans and is an eclectic assortment of fiction, poetry, and essays. In keeping with MacAdam/Cage’s and Sonny Brewer's commitment to new writers, The Alumni Grill, Volume II, includes writers with first books on the way – such as Jack Pendarvis, whose story, "The Poet I Know," is a hilarious inside look at a writing conference, and Brad Vice, who shares a quirky take on the 1950s KKK in Tuscaloosa – as well as writers whose first books are still in the works.

Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton—the faithless young naval lieutenant who abandons Madam Butterfly—was glimpsed fleetingly in Peter Rushforth’s previous novel, Pinkerton’s Sister. Now Ben steps out of the shadows and into the center of the stage, a young man haunted by the desolation of his boyhood years, unable to show or respond to love. Once again, in his mastery of language, his humor, his extraordinary imagination, and his superb sense of time and place, Peter Rushforth has given the world another masterpiece, ranking alongside, or surpassing, his earlier triumphs.

Monty and Cookie are back in a brand-new adventure. While out in the woods Monty and Cookie stumble upon a strange machine, untouched for years. What follows is a monstrous adventure that will take them back to a time long long ago.Hold on tight because the excitement has just begun. We're off to a world undiscovered for thousands of years... Welcome to the Land of the Dinodogs!

Eric B. Martin’s sweeping and highly praised debut novel of young love and family feuds lays bare the new race and class wars of a swiftly changing south. By turns lyrical and brutal, Luck echoes with the voices of unexpected characters: the self-assured musings of Hermelinda Salmeron; local wise guy Harvey Dickerson philosophizing from beyond the grave; and a chorus of the county’s consciousness at Eddie’s Bar-N-Q.Eric B. Martin grew up in Maine, studied in North Carolina and Texas, and lives in San Francisco.

Haunted by the deaths of his mother and grandmother, both of whom perished while hiking through Australia’s Blue Mountains, Sam Browne returns to the country of his mother’s birth in search of his family’s history and a way to make a place for himself within it. By reading his grandmother’s memoirs, Sam begins to connect to his family’s ancestral home and understand the reasons that she and her daughter after her were so drawn to the Australian landscape and the mystery found there.

Following his celebrated debut, Horace Afoot, Frederick Reuss returns with another endearing hero—a six-year-old Gnostic with a photographic memory. Henry is being reared, at least intermittently, by gamblers, thieves, whores, and priests in one of America's most notorious sin cities. But from time to time, he seems to believe he's living as a saint in 5th century Byzantium, making this an ironic, funny, and heart-rending account of the ways we become our own saviors by choosing what to believe.

A wealthy, erudite, middle-aged loner in search of anonymity settles in the aptly named midwestern town of Oblivion and is swiftly drawn into the town's persistent local mysteries in this idiosyncratic, rather beguiling debut novel. The newcomer is, by any standards, peculiar: He repeatedly changes his name, adopting names of writers he particularly admires, among them William Blake and, most memorably, Quintus Horatius Flaccus (the Roman poet Horace). And in a place where everyone drives, he walks. It's while he's doing so, hiking into the country to visit an old Indian mound, that he becomes inextricably tangled in the town's affairs. A young woman, naked and bleeding, stumbles out of a cornfield and collapses. Horace becomes a prime suspect in her assault, until Sylvia, the young woman, regains consciousness and clears him. She refuses to name her attacker, though, and the police (who harbor some nasty secrets of their own) keep a wary eye on Horace. They become even more suspicious when he's drawn into the violent, messy world Sylvia (a self-destructive, small-time drug dealer) inhabits. And then her callow boyfriend, infuriated by her affection for Horace, begins to follow and harass the newcomer. Horace, against his better judgment, finds himself promising to help Sylvia escape from Oblivion. In doing so, he stumbles across some of the town's unpalatable secrets, putting his life itself at risk. Reuss, in a spare, precise prose, does a deft job of catching, without overdoing, the quirks, obsessions, and longings of his characters. And he effectively renders the unsettling (and misleading) calm of Oblivion, a town frantic to deny or suppress life's unpredictability. Horace, however, is a bit wearing--too skittish, too stubbornly incapable of change--to be very appealing. Still, his voice lingers, as do many of the scenes in this terse, moving exploration of modern anomie and the longing for--and fear of- -intimacy.

This is the story of an unlucky black cat, who has nowhere to live. As Winter approaches he searches for a place to shelter from the terrible weather. He is giving up hope of ever having a normal life again, when he spots lights in the distance. Will he be lucky or will he be left out in the cold..? Fully illustrated with colour illustrations throughout.

While his parents shop for reconciliation in European furniture stores, 13-year-old Fish Becker is sent to spend the summer with Miles and Ariana Lambert. Ariana can't sleep for fear of who she'll be when she awakens, and Miles is touched, perhaps to a fault, by the romanticism we know first in our lives. While their visionary daughter, Mira, leads Fish through magic midnight rituals, their son introduces him to every kind of excess. Touched by a gentle humor that runs straight up against the isolation of human sadness, The Island is a rich coming-of-age story.