Date of Disappearance

by M. Allen Cunningham

Date of Disappearance is a collection of ten short stories, several originally published in fine literary magazines like The Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, and Epoch, one of them a Pushcart Prize nominee, and three previously featured in live performance by the New Short Fiction Series of Beverly Hills.

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

M. Allen Cunningham published his debut novel The Green Age of Asher Witherow at age 26. Set in nineteenth-century Northern California, The Green Age served as the inaugural title for independent publisher Unbridled Books, was widely acclaimed, was selected by the American Booksellers Association as a #1 Indie Next Pick, was a Finalist for the Indie Next Book of the Year Award in a shortlist with Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, and Joyce Carol Oates' The Falls, was named a “Best Book of the West” in the Salt Lake Tribune, was a USA Today Novel to Watch, and was dubbed a "Regional Classic" by the Mountain & Plains Booksellers Association. Foreword Reviews praised The Green Age as "a feat reminiscent of William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness," and later called Cunningham "one of America's most promising voices." Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler called the novel "a startling accomplishment," and Booklist said it "displays a mastery that is surprising in a novelistic debut." The Green Age was published in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland by Atrium Verlag. Audible released an audio edition in 2014.

Three years after his debut, Cunningham released Lost Son (Unbridled Books), an experimental biographical novel about Rainer Maria Rilke which was the culmination of more than 10 years of reading, writing, research, and travel. Ihab Hassan, one of the 20th century's most distinguished critics, said "the magic of Rilke reach[es] out from every page," and called Lost Son "a subtle and signal imaginative achievement, putting readers on notice: an extraordinary talent has come upon the scene." Lost Son was added to the official Rilke bibliography by a consortium of European scholars. Cunningham was interviewed at length alongside Russell Banks, Michael Cunningham, Anita Diamant, Ron Hansen, Joyce Carol Oates, and Jay Parini for the book Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists (Bloomsbury, 2014, ed. Michael Lackey). Lost Son receives in-depth consideration in scholar Zivile Gimbutas' study of 20th-century artist novels entitled Artistic Individuality, where it is featured beside the work of authors Willa Cather, James Joyce, John Updike, and Virginia Woolf. Lost Son was listed as a Top 10 Book of 2007 in The Oregonian, and reviewer Vernon Peterson said "Cunningham's writing is beautiful and fluid. I found myself torn, lingering over passages and yet eager to rush on...But I'm not sure it's right to see Lost Son simply as a fictional biography of Rilke. It is also Cunningham's spiritual autobiography, his own fierce identification with the poet's commitment to art...mesmerizing."

Cunningham has subsequently published six other books, including the novel Perpetua's Kin (2018), a multi-generational story about American restlessness and the residual effects of war that spans most of North America over more than a century. "With Perpetua's Kin," says Pulitzer Prize Finalist Eowyn Ivey, "M. Allen Cunningham once again demonstrates he is one of the bravest and most talented novelists writing today. With each page we gain the greatest gift of fiction: an insight into our own trembling humanity."

Cunningham's shorter work has appeared widely in distinguished literary journals and magazines, and his new book Q&A will appear from Regal House Publishing in January 2021.

He is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Portland State University, an instructor for Clackamas Community College, teaches advanced creative writing for UC Berkeley's ATDP, and has served as a guest lecturer and thesis advisor in the Pan-European MFA Program.

Cunningham hosts the weekly creativity podcast In the Atelier and the atmospheric Thoreau's Leaves

Reviews

[Ian Rogers · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found "Date of Disappearance" through author Cunningham's small press, Atelier 26 Books, and I'm so glad I did. The ten stories in this collection present a finely crafted variety of voices, topics, and narrative structures, ranging from the ramblings of a lovestruck middle-schooler to the contemplations of a studious taxidermist. M. Allen Cunningham has an uncanny ability to capture the emotions of real people, their struggles, and their fears: the title story (and my favorite in the collection) centers on the thirtysomething protagonist's uncertainties about having children, his inability to express his feelings to his wife, and his lack of action in confronting the swarms of bees nesting in his walls. "The Best Man," too, shows us the protagonist's weakest moments as he faces a bully from his past and struggles with how to both comfort and seek support from his only son. Much of the pathos in the collection comes from that which goes unsaid, but is shared in a different way, a bridging of the gap between people at all stages of their lives.

No small part of my positive experience with this book came from the sheer care and presentation that went into the physical copy, which has a well-designed jacket, glossy illustrations, and is signed and numbered in a special printing. As an author and a publisher, M. Allen Cunningham is certainly capable of wowing an audience with his craft.