Sour Cherries at Buc-ee’s, by Mark Elberfeld

What do sour cherries, a subway reprimand in Moscow, and an imaginary alligator named Fluffy have in common? In Sour Cherries at Buc-ee’s, Mark Elberfeld invites readers on a deeply personal—and often unexpectedly funny—journey through memory, movement, and meaning.

From a seventh-grade retreat on the Mattaponi River to the surreal vastness of a Buc-ee’s gas station, Elberfeld traces the threads of identity, place, and connection. Whether he’s reflecting on summer camp, road trips in an electric car, the quiet radicalism of hospitality, or a friend’s hauntingly beautiful art show, his essays linger in that liminal space between the ordinary and the profound.

With humor, honesty, and a teacher’s instinct for drawing meaning from mess, Elberfeld explores what it means to leave, to return, to remember, and to reframe. For anyone who’s ever found themselves crying in a parking lot, questioning the shape of freedom, or chasing summer like a white whale—this book might just be the life ring you didn’t know you needed.

“In Mark Elberfeld’s Sour Cherries, we meet something to relish: an unrelenting mind on the page. Here, we travel to summer camp, to Switzerland, to Vermont, and that dreaded region: chemistry class. Humorous and meditative, Sour Cherries ponders that age-old quandary: Why must we travel away to really understand who we are, at home, in ourselves? Building in tension, with wide-ranging material from Frankenstein and Walt Whitman to Shawna Miller and getting a rental car, Sour Cherries is a delight that explores all the complexities of human emotion.”

—Taylor Brorby, author of Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land