“So much else disappears, yet it feels like most of us have a handful of stories we tell ourselves about how we became the people we are, stories that ideally would probably get swapped out over time as we grow and heal and go forward.”
Matt Bell sits down with Hobart founder Aaron Burch to discuss Burch’s soon-to-be-released debut story collection, Backswing.
Last week’s feature was Matt Bell’s debut novel, In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Lori Weiman (@laweiman) Sondra Morin (@sondramorin) Matt Dojny (@Matt_Dojny) Congrats! To claim your free copy, please email us at the following address: winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us! Thanks to all of you who are fans. We appreciate your support. Let us know your favorite new books out there!
This week’s feature is Matt Bell’s debut novel, In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, which is just out from Soho Press. Bell is also the author of the novella Cataclysm Baby and the story collection How They Were Found, as well as three chapbooks: Wolf Parts, The Collectors, and How the Broken Lead the Blind. His fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including Conjunctions, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Gulf Coast, Willow Springs, Unsaid, and American Short Fiction, and has been selected for inclusion in anthologies such as Best American Mystery Stories and Best American Fantasy. […]
Aaron Burch talks with friend and fellow writer Matt Bell about the release of his debut novel, In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as where the personal intersects the fictional, why empathy matters, and writing in new directions.
Editor’s note: As part of our continuing celebration of Short Story Month, we’re delighted to present a guest post by Matt Bell, editor at Dzanc Books and of the literary magazine The Collagist. There’s so much good fiction online that writing about only a few of the magazines out there seems an incredibly unfair task: During my reading for the Best of the Web anthology that we publish at Dzanc, I’ve read thousands of pieces from hundreds of magazines, and there are probably dozens of magazines you should be reading as often as humanly possible. To make my task in […]
Two recent releases from Dzanc imprint Keyhole Press expand the scope of literary fiction. How to Predict the Weather by Aaron Burch and How They Were Found by Matt Bell create provocative new worlds in their debut collections of short stories. Consistent with this press’s production of thought-provoking fiction, Burch and Bell unravel beautiful and unsettling tales with exquisite prose.
Our history with print’s first-rate publications can be a comforting force, a grid of familiar local streets against the sand-swept dunes of online. And it’s this lack of familiarity with digital’s landscape that makes Dzanc’s anthology so incredibly necessary: for new and old writers alike, it’s a guidebook as much as it is a book-book.
In both of the recent New York Times reviews of E.L. Doctorow’s new novel, Homer & Langley, which is based on the lives of the Collyer brothers, the reviewers go out of their way to point to other works drawn from the lives of these eccentric, hoarding bachelor shut-ins: Marcia Davenport’s My Brother’s Keeper, Richard Greenberg’s The Dazzle, Franz Lidz’s Ghosty Men: The Strange but True Story of the Collyer Brothers and My Uncle Arthur, New York’s Greatest Hoarders, and a variety of other books, films, plays, and TV shows. In short: we are obsessed with the obsessed. Nowhere is this clearer than in Matt Bell’s The Collectors, which is also based on the lives of the Collyer brothers, and deserves to be added to this canon.
