Fiction at Literati: Matt Bell

Literati is delighted to welcome Matt Bell back to Ann Arbor in support of his most recent work, A Tree or a Person or a Wall.

Here we have Matt Bell at his most inventive and uncanny: parents and children, murderers and monsters, wild renditions of the past, and stunning visions of the present, all of which build to a virtuoso reimagining of our world. A 19th-century minister builds an elaborate motor that will bring about the Second Coming. A man with rough hands locks a boy in a room with an albino ape. An apocalyptic army falls under a veil of forgetfulness. The story of Red Riding Hood is run through a potentially endless series of iterations. A father invents an elaborate, consuming game for his hospitalized son. Indexes, maps, a checkered shirt buried beneath a blanket of snow: they are scattered through these pages as clues to mysteries that may never be solved,  ingering evidence of the violence and unknowability of the world. A Tree or a Person or a Wall brings together Bell’s previously published shorter fiction—the story collection How They Were Found and the acclaimed novella Cataclysm Baby—along with seven dark and disturbing new stories, to create a collection of singular power.

“These fables plumb the depths of human longing… a collection that resonates like a tuning fork, lingering after the book is closed.”—Publishers Weekly

“A clutch of stories with a flavor of the experimental, the apocalyptic, and often both…Admirable efforts to strip familiarity and sentiment from stories of humanity at its worst.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Told in a mythic, ­omniscient voice, some of these pieces read like cruel fairy tales… Imagine a tale from Lydia Davis on a bad trip… smart and edgy.”—Library Journal

Matt Bell is the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, which was a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, a Michigan Notable Book, and an Indies Choice Adult Debut Book of the Year Honor Recipient, as well as the winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award. His writing has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Tin House, The New York Times, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, The American Reader, and many other publications. Born in Michigan, he now teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.