Press Release: The Church of the Oversoul and Other Stories by Ethan Goffman

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” said Joan Didion. We use this gift of storytelling to make sense of this strange, horrible, wonderful, slippery thing called life. From literary fiction to fantasy and science fiction, these stories and a novella provide a surrealistic roadmap to our strangest of times, encompassing political anger in the workplace, climate disaster in cherished places, virtual reality in daily life, artificial intelligence and the human psyche, sexual fluidity and ambiguity, and the paradoxes of new age evangelicalism. The Church of the Oversoul and Other Stories will leave you pondering just who we are in the twenty-first century, how we got here, and what might come next.

“A good story is more important than complete fidelity to the truth,” Ethan Goffman writes. Indeed, throughout this collection of short stories, truth proves chimeric, as borderlines between fact and fantasy perpetually shift. Dreams and visions infiltrate the lives of Goffman’s characters, who themselves often seem rather hapless. Despite the elements of magical realism that infuse Goffman’s stories, there are no storybook heroes or villains here, only ordinary people caught in a dystopian world, who nevertheless manage to muddle through. At first glance, these stories might strike the reader as being rather sad, even forlorn. But look again — there is a dark comedy at work here, a cosmic joke, which Goffman strives to illuminate. These are stories of dogged endurance by those who rebel against an often hostile universe. The outcomes may be bittersweet, even tragic, but the human spirit carries on, unconquered. 

 W. Luther Jett, renowned Washington, DC area poetry advocate and organizer and the author of Flying to America (Broadstone Press, 2024) and five other books of poetry

"Salvador Dali must be laughing or crying in his grave—probably both—at this dripping, oozing world,” notes one character in The Church of the Oversoul and Other Stories. Reading this book is like taking a vacation into other realms. Ethan Goffman offers stories ranging from the brief to the connected or interconnected pieces of the seven-part “Pifflemeyer.”

You know the rollercoaster has started when Goffman gives readers “a day as lovely as a Hallmark card.” Then, there is the Vonnegut-like tone of “Bertha.” “The Book of Joe” has its own unique connection to the biblical Book of Job while “A Real Man” seems an extension of Anthony Burgess’s novel The Wanting Seed. “The Cruelest Month” asks, “Why doesn’t more go wrong with people?” Goffman shows us how that’s possible within these pages.

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---Bill Cushing, author of The Commies Come to Waterton, Heroic Brothers of the Civil War, and other books

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Setu, February 2025