From GATHERING VOLUMES
Gathering Volumes, 196 E. Boundary, Perrysburg, will welcome Bowling Green State University professor, Ohio State alumni, and author Wendell Mayo to the store in support of his latest short story collection, Survival House, Saturday Oct. 6 2-4 p.m..
About the Book: Survival House is Wendell Mayo’s fifth short-story collection. It is in part autobiographically informed by his father’s work on nuclear power for deep space travel at NASA’s Lewis Research Center (now named the John Glenn Space Center) in Cleveland, Ohio in the 1960s and 1970s, the height of the space and nuclear arms races. Often humorous, always resonant, the ten stories in Survival House not only look back to the collective mind of doom in the atomic age of the 1950s and 1960s, but also address its legacy in our time—the emergence of new nuclear powers, polarizing politics, and the ever-tightening grip of corporations. In contemporary stories, such as “Doom Town,” a small-town festival annually celebrates the survival of the human race by conducting riotous air raids. In “The Trans-Siberian Railway Comes to Whitehouse,” a bar owner desperately clings to a new all-things-Russian theme to save himself from financial ruin. Other stories, set in the 1960s, recast the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy assassination, and Space Race in personal histories of the human heart that remind us what it takes to endure—both then, and now.
About the Author: Wendell Mayo completed a BS in Chemical Engineering from The Ohio State University and worked as an environmental and energy engineer for thirteen years before turning to writing fiction in 1988. Since then, he has authored five full-length story collections, two reviewed in The New York Times Book Review, and another in The LA Times. His debut collection, Centaur of the North, was winner of the Premio Aztlán and the sole finalist in the AWP Award Series in Short Fiction, selected by Lorrie Moore. In addition to Survival House, his other story collections are The Cucumber King of Kedainiai; B. Horror and Other Stories; and a novel-in-stories, In Lithuanian Wood, which appeared in Lithuanian translation as Vilko Valanda [Engl: Hour of the Wolf] with Mintis Press in Vilnius. Over one-hundred of his short stories have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, including Yale Review, Harvard Review, Manoa, Missouri Review, Boulevard, New Letters, Threepenny Review, Indiana Review, Chicago Review, and others. He completed his Ph.D. in English at Ohio University and has taught over twenty years in the MFA / BFA Creative Writing Programs at Bowling Green State University.
