Life on Other Moons

Life on Other Moons is the debut fiction collection from Roger Market. It was first published in simultaneous limited editions in May 2013 (paperback and handmade). It is now being released for the first time as an e-book.

The collection opens with "Stopping to Talk to Porch Lights When the Moon Is Not Enough." After the last woman on Earth dies and the moon breaks in half, the male survivors begin to question love, masculinity, and fate. The story centers on the question "What does it mean to be a man in a world without women?" In the title story, "Life on Other Moons," a civilization on the moon begins to rebuild after decades of civil war. Three other stories chart the progress of a boy and his father on their multi-year journey from rural, 1960s Alabama to a war-torn Vietnam and ultimately to the moon.

But the moon does not dominate every story.

In "Don't Mind the Bunny," a little girl's disability becomes apparent through the objective viewpoint of a stuffed bunny. "Love the Shoes" chronicles the first meeting of a father, after a long stretch in prison, with his teenage son. In "The Paper Man," a society of primitive but powerful women encounters the first man to enter its gates in decades.

While the book's eleven stories are linked in unexpected ways, they do not necessarily take place in the same version of reality. The characters in Life on Other Moons are united in their common search for a home, a functional family, a sense of self.

Will they find peace?

The author invites you to interact with him on social media using the hashtag #LifeMoons, as well as through e-mail. Details are at the end of the book.

Roger Market is originally from Montezuma, Indiana. He graduated from Wabash College in 2009 with a BA in English and a minor in history. He received his MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts in 2013 from the University of Baltimore, and this book is the result of that study. He is a writer, an editor, a photographer, a graphic designer, a TV junkie, a lover, and a friend, and he dreams of writing for TV one day. He is enamored with technology. If time travel were possible, his first stop would by July 20, 1969, to experience the first lunar landing—one of the single greatest moments of American history.