On April 27, 2011, just days after learning of their pregnancy, B. J. Hollars, his wife, and their future son endured the onslaught of an EF-4 tornado. There, while huddled in a bathtub in their Alabama home, mortality flashed before their eyes. With the last of his computer battery, Hollars began recounting the experience, and would continue to do so in the following years, writing his way out of one disaster only to find himself caught up in another. Tornadoes, drownings, and nuclear catastrophes force him to acknowledge the inexplicable, while he attempts to overcome his greatest fear―the impossibility of protecting his newborn son from the world’s cruelties. Hollars creates a constellation of grief, tapping into the rarely acknowledged intersection between fatherhood and fear, sacrifice and safety, and the humbling effect of losing control of our lives.

This Is Only a Test (Break Away Books)

Literature & Fiction

Church, Steven

Hollars, B.J.

Olsen, W. Scott

Oliu, Brian

Humor & Satire

Break Away Book Club Edition

Pogo Stick Jumping. The greatest number of jumps achieved is 105,338 by Michael Barban in 18 hours on September 12, 1978, in Florissant, Missouri. Scott Spencer...of Wilmington, Delaware, covered 6 miles in 6 1Ï¿½2 hours in September 1974. 
 -- Guinness Book of World Records, Giant 1980 Super-Edition 
 In this wildly imaginative memoir about an oversized midwestern boy's obsession with the Guinness Book of World Records, a tale of growing up different takes on epic proportions. "It was the Guinness books that gave me an escape," proclaims Steven Church in this darkly comic memoir, "a strange and seductive escape into the territory of the imagination." The Guinness Book of Me recalls a perilous youth strewn with the shadows of record holders, past and present, whose cameos add layers of meaning in fabulous and unexpected ways. 
 Have you ever wondered why someone would grow the world's longest fingernails or eat an eleven-foot tree? Steven Church has. His bizarre speculative investigations have less to do with the truth and more to do with a celebration of freaks, an exploration of memory, and an examination of identity. In fierce, muscled prose, Church explores a childhood lived between a father and younger brother who are each larger than life. Both hilarious and heartbreaking, The Guinness Book of Me will captivate and surprise you. This is more than a memoir; it's an engaging homage to pop culture, a powerful look at life's extremes, and an impressive debut from a promising young writer.

The Guinness Book of Me: A Memoir of Record

Biographies & Memoirs

Regional U.S.

Simon&Schuster

In this collage of essays, letters, movies, advertisements, and every other medium known to man, Steven Church, author of The Guinness Book of Me, journeys to the depths of the human mind through his often bizarre turns of thought. Church philosophizes without any philosophical rhetoric and questions everything without seeming to question a thing. This thought-provoking postmodern jumble of serial killers, obsessive correspondences, and jumbo toys will leave you both enlightened and thoroughly entertained.

Theoretical Killings: Essays & Accidents

United States

Uno Pr

Steven Church grew up in the 1970s and ’80s in Lawrence, Kansas, a town whose predictable daily rhythms give way easily to anxietyand a place that, since Civil War times, has been a canvas for sporadic scenes of havoc and violence in the popular imagination. Childhood was quiet on the surface, but Steven grew up scaredscared of killer tornadoes, winged monkeys, violent movies, authority figures, the dissolution of his parents’ marriage, and most of all in Reagan’s America, nuclear war. His fantasies of nuclear meltdown, genetic mutation, and post-apocalyptic survival find a focal point in 1982 when filming begins in Lawrence for The Day After, a film which would go on to become the second-highest Nielsen-rated TV movie. Despite cheesy special effects, melodramatic plotlines, and the presence of Steve Guttenberg, the movie had an instant and lasting impact on Church, and an entire generation. Combining interview, personal essay, film criticism, fact, and flights of imagination, Church’s richly layered and darkly comic memoir explores the meaning of Cold War fears for his generation and their resonance today.

The Day After The Day After: My Atomic Angst

Professionals & Academics

Catapult

On September 21, 2012, twenty-five year old David Villalobos purchased a pass for the Bronx Zoo and a ticket for a ride on the Bengali Express Monorail. Biding his time, he waited until the monorail was just near the enclosure of a four hundred pound Siberian tiger named Bashuta before leaping into it. They spent ten long minutes together in the tiger’s cage before nature took its course, with one exception: The tiger did not kill him. David’s only response: It’s a spiritual thing. I wanted to be at one with the tiger.” One with The Tiger: On Savagery and Intimacy uses David’s story, and other moments of violent encounters between humans and predators, to explore the line between human and animal. Exposing what the author defines as the shared liminal space between peace and violence,” Church posits that the animal is always encroaching on the civilization and those seeking its wildness are in fact searching for an ecstatic moment that can define what it means to be human. Using examples from Timothy Treadwell to Mike Tyson, or such television icons as Grizzly Adams and The Incredible Hulk, Church shows how this ecstasy can seep its way into the less natural world of popular culture, proving time and again that each of us can be our own worst predator.

One With the Tiger: Sublime and Violent Encounters Between Humans and Animals

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Ultrasonic is a "brilliant and disarming" collection of linked essays that explore how sound can be used to search for deeper meaning beneath the surface of everyday life. Beginning with his 2011 Best American Essay, "Auscultation," a piece that is now taught in high schools across the country, Steven Church takes the reader on an associative journey into questions of identity, family, fear, loss, and the politics of space. With a trademark relentless curiosity reminiscent of David Shields, Matthew Gavin Frank or Ander Monson, and the stylistic gymnastics of Lia Purpura, Bernard Cooper or Maggie Nelson, the book explores the emotionally resonant experiences of witnessing a drowning, losing a sibling in a car accident, and raising a young daughter. But Ultrasonic is also a book about the mysteries and wonder of language, a book that considers the various meanings of words like, "dither," "sounding," or "loitering;" Even the seemingly mundane word pairing, "crown and shoulder" become, for Church, touchstones for an idiosyncratic meditation on the death of his brother in car accident and the way such losses return in our present lives. At every turn, Ultrasonic dares us to think more deeply about each other and about the world around us. How many times do we see a, "No Loitering," sign and think nothing of it? Church thinks everything about it, using the sign as a way to consider the politics of public liminal spaces and the ways we attempt to criminalize or marginalize those who inhabit such spaces. More than one reader has compared Church's exploration of the everyday and his confronting of himself on the page to the work of Montaigne; and it's true that a stethoscope may never look the same to you again after reading Ultrasonic, but Church is also a mischievous and humorous writer who isn't afraid to imagine what Elvis Presley's last racquetball game might have been like or how he might respond to the ever-present police helicopters in his neighborhood. Like Eula Biss's Notes from No Man's Land or Leslie Jamison's Empathy Exams, Ultrasonic moves in layers and circles of association or juxtaposition, where the meaning accretes as the reader progresses and doubles back over ideas and images. With "equal parts tenderness and rage," each chapter operates both as an independent essay and as an echo chamber for the larger ideas, gazing at our human predicament through such eccentric and varied lenses as trapped miners, stethoscopes, racquetball, language, loitering, violence, Elvis, and the music of torture. The result is, among other things, "one of the oddest and loveliest mediations on parenthood," you'll ever read. Grand and active listening requires real engagement and unexpected risks. In Steven Church's thoroughly alive compendium, the act of listening itself has the power to create identity, lead inward towards irrevocable grief and awe, and outward into the ever-curious world. How "ultra" in its sonic musings can a mind be? Church's intense soundscape considers subjects as ranging as racquetball, idleness, and firefighting, as poetic as word-origins, and as ancient as birth, love, and loss.
 Each beautifully crafted essay in Steven Church's Ultrasonic invites the reader into an intriguing new world. From Elvis playing racquetball to the drumming heartbeat of an infant to prehistoric bottom feeders, Church's endless curiosity and wildly intelligent prose pierce the literary bull's-eye, spot on.
 —Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic &amp; Desire

Ultrasonic

Parenting & Relationships

Lavender Ink

Acclaimed essayist Steven Church reflects on work, fear and fatherhood in a series of encounters that defy comfortable answers. From the depths of a tourist-trap gold mine to the edges of a meteor crater to the jagged landscapes of marriage and parenting, shift and flux are always front and center. In his sixth book of nonfiction, Church illustrates once again the immeasurable value of an open, essayistic mind.

I'm Just Getting To The Disturbing Part: On Work, Fear and Fatherhood

Steven, Church

Arts & Literature

Outpost19

Twenty-eight landmark essays from The Normal School magazine — the standard-bearer for creative nonfiction today. From a diverse list of authors, startling reflections on the exceptional and the everyday. An essential guide to the art of nonfiction with new commentary from each contributor: Joe Bonomo, Kristen Cosby, Timothy Denevi, Silas Hansen, Caitlin Horrocks, Todd W. Kaneko, Matthew Komatsu, Dickson Lam, EJ Levy, Patrick Madden, Brenda Miller/Julie Marie Wade, Thomas Mira Y Lopez, Ander Monson, Rick Moody, Dinty W. Moore, Jaclyn Moyer, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Jericho Parms, Elena Passarello, Lia Purpura, Colin Rafferty, David Shields, Margot Singer, Ana Maria Spagna, Natalie Vestin, Jerald Walker and Rachel Yoder

The Spirit of Disruption: Landmark Work from The Normal School

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