Author Page: Bob Sommer

A Great Fullness by Bob Sommer

Releases December 2013

Press kit forthcoming. Pre-Orders [forthcoming] will be made available on the Publications & Store page.

Bob Sommer’s work has appeared widely in literary, scholarly, and commercial publications, including Centennial Review, Studies in American Fiction, American Book Review, New England Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review, New Letters Review of Books, Hudson Valley Magazine, Rain Taxi Review of Books, and elsewhere. In addition to the 2008 novel Where the Wind Blew, he is the author of Teaching Writing to Adults and co-author of The Heath Literature for Composition. His recent freelance work, stories, and commentary have appeared in The Kansas City Star, Chronogram, Prick of the Spindle, Counterpunch, We Need Not Walk Alone, and other print and digital publications. He holds a doctorate in literature from Duke University and is listed with Poets & Writers and the Kansas Center for the Book. Bob is currently writing a memoir about his late son Francis and his family’s experiences during the past decade of American war. Bob and his wife Heather make their home in Overland Park, Kansas, where they raised three children to adulthood. Visit his blog, Uncommon Hours, at http://uncommon-hours.blogspot.com/.

About the Novel:
 Set in Kansas during the period from the internet bubble of the mid-1990s through the early years of the Iraq War, A Great Fullness is the story of a girl who lives with a secret that even she doesn’t know she possesses – the truth about her mother’s death.

Purchase link:
[coming soon]

Title Availability

Press kit here.
Publisher Direct
Kindle edition [pending]
Ingram distribution [pending]
Barnes & Noble [pending]
Amazon.com [pending]

Advance Praise for A Great Fullness :

With cinematic clarity and pace, A Great Fullness takes us inside a family caught in turmoil, as the drama of their lives reflects our troubled society and its broken capacity for joy. With illuminating skill, Bob Sommer heightens the reader’s awareness of both family dysfunction and our nation’s drift into war and needless ecological disaster, as history is held hostage to the misguided decisions of our leaders. Recent historical events are very well handled, avoiding didacticism while weaving humor and insight into an entertaining and relevant five-star tale.
—David Ray, award-winning poet, author of Sam’s Book and over a dozen other collections

Bob Sommer writes eloquently about ordinary Midwestern Americans confronted with the extraordinarily disruptive pressures of the twenty-first century. Again and again in this story of a girl raised by her aunt and uncle after her home has dissolved in a flurry of domestic bloodletting, one is struck with the complexity of seemingly nondescript characters and the menace behind the bland appearance of bedroom communities and sleek suburban malls. One is asked to care deeply about each character, likeable and not, and to experience an astonishing degree of secret sharing with respect to hopes, plans, perplexities, vulnerabilities, and defeats. The Kansas of A Great Fullness is too deeply understood and too particularly and painfully rendered to be just any place. Readers will come away from this book with a deepened understanding of the violence and longing that shape contemporary American life.
—William Merrill Decker, author of Kodak Elegy: A Cold War Childhood

 

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