FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The University of Arkansas Press has published House of Pain: New and Selected Essays by Laurence Gonzales (paper, $24.95).

Gonzales was a Press author early in a successful writing career that has included National Magazine awards and bestsellers. He published The Still Point with the Press in 1989 and The Hero’s Apprentice in 1994. This new collection gathers selected work from these two books and also newer, never published stories.  

Gonzales has become known for choosing gritty, intense subjects, and House of Pain is no exception. Stories explore life in a maximum-security prison, take the reader into the grim world of a brain surgeon at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital, and follow Gonzales and his wife on their journey through cancer. Readers are taken above the Arctic Circle, traveling deep into the Alaskan wilderness, among grizzly bears and trumpeter swans. Gonzales also explores aerobatics in high-performance aircraft and eulogizes Memphis and Miami as American cities that mourn their fates in uniquely different ways.

According to Kirkus Reviews, “Gonzales travels where few people might want to go, and he brings back wondrous tales.”

Gonzales has written for publications including National Geographic Adventure, Outside, Harper’s Magazine, and Men’s Journal. His books include the non-fiction bestseller Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why (Norton) and the novel Lucy (Knopf).

The University of Arkansas Press was founded in 1980 as the book publishing division of the University of Arkansas. A member of the Association of American University Presses, it has as its central and continuing mission the publication of books that serve both the broader academic community and Arkansas and the region.