Rochester, N.Y. — BOA Editions is excited to announce that The Science of Lost Futures by Ryan Habermeyer is a finalist for the 2019 Association for Mormon Letters Award in the Short Fiction Collection category. The Association for Mormon Letters announced the finalists in the Novel, Short Fiction Collection, and Short Fiction categories on their website yesterday, February 11, 2019. The winners of the 2019 Association for Mormon Letters Awards will be announced and presented on March 30 at the AML Conference, held in Berkeley, California.
The Science of Lost Futures is a prize-winning collection full of quirky humor and intelligent absurdity. An enormous foot washes ashore just outside the city limits prompting fear and fascination. A man responds to an advertisement for a “no experience necessary” cosmonaut training program. A woman collapses inside the black hole she is growing on her shoulder. Too familiar or boring? How about a neighbor who mysteriously grows parsnips in the shape of his dead wife’s kidney, a sleep-deprived worker who searches for love in a doll factory, or a former Nazi adopted as a household pet? Drawing on urban legends, internet hoaxes, and ancient medical folklore, these stories go beyond science fiction and magical realism to create a captivating collection of fabulist stories that revel in the alien and the absurd.
Ryan Habermeyer is a native of Los Angeles. He received his M.F.A. from the Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Ph.D. from the University of Missouri. His award-winning stories and essays have received two Pushcart Prize nominations and been published in Hotel Amerika, Cincinnati Review, Carolina Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Mid-American Review, and Phoebe, among others. He lives on the Eastern Shore of Maryland where he teaches creative writing at Salisbury University.
The Association for Mormon Letters (AML) is a nonprofit founded in 1976 to “foster scholarly and creative work in Mormon letters and to promote fellowship among scholars and writers of Mormon literature.” Other organization mottos have included the promotion of quality writing “by, for, and about Mormons” and promoting the “production and study of Mormon literature.” Each year the AML has presented the juried AML Awards to honor the best works by, for, and about Mormons. More information about the AML Awards can be found on the AML Website: http://associationmormonletters.org.
