Matt Bell - How They Were Found

In his debut collection How They Were Found, Matt Bell draws from a wide range of genres to create stories that are both formally innovative and imaginatively rich. In one, a 19th-century minister wrestles with his pride as he follows ghostly instructions to build a mechanical messiah. In another, a tyrannical army commander watches his apocalyptic command slip away as the memories of his men begin to fade and fail. Elsewhere, murders are indexed, new worlds are mapped, and fairy tales are fractured and retold and then fractured again. Throughout these thirteen stories, Bell's careful prose burrows at the foundations of his characters' lives until they topple over, then painstakingly pores over the wreckage for what rubbled humanity might yet remain to be found.

Excerpt: Read "Dredge," selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2010

ADVANCE PRAISE

"Reminscent of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Winter War in Tibet in its calm examination and unsettling embodiment of mental and physical extremes, How They Were Found is a dreamer's chronicle of the loss and partial recovery of a world given over to the wrecking ball. Fierce, unflinching, funny, How They Were Found is just the book we need right now, Matt Bell just the writer."

—Laird Hunt, author of Ray of the Star

"How They Were Found offers a world with shifting rules, described with a lovely and deceptive simplicity. This guide shows you thirteen different types of wilderness, and you can spend all day exploring before you realize you are lost."

—Amelia Gray, author of Museum of the Weird and AM/PM

"You're a robot if the stories in Matt Bell's debut collection don't exhilarate, frighten, and unalterably change you. His wild manipulation of form and genre makes the bulk of contemporary fiction feel bloodless and inert in comparison, but it is Bell's recurring arrival at something sturdy and true about human behavior that makes the stories in How They Were Found so rewarding and resonant."

—Matthew Derby, author of Super Flat Times: Stories

PRAISE FOR THE COLLECTORS

"The Collectors is a compelling portrait both of the way a heated mind can come to recreate the world and of how fascination with such a mind can end up being its own sort of trap. A wonderful, obsessive novella."

—Brian Evenson, author of Fugue State and Last Days

"Bell’s fiction excites pity for those who live, as though walled up, in ruins of their own necessary construction. I admire The Collectors for the certainty of its prose and its unflinching observation of a most profound alienation—envying the first; fearing the second; and unhappily aware that artifice—no matter how splendid—is inadequate to ameliorate the despair."

—Norman Lock, author of Shadowplay

"Matt Bell's lifesick pair, Langley and Homer, shell-shocked under a pile of newspapers, are disquieting, hilarious, and—in that strange way that makes Beckett's and Kafka's characters so urgent—entirely recognizable. Bell has written a beauty."

—Deb Olin Unferth, author of Vacation

"The Collectors suggests, ultimately, that there exists no better form of renewal than the accommodating art of story."

—John Domini, Bookslut

"Matt Bell’s The Collectors is a jaw-dropping achievement."

—Adam Robinson, The Chapbook Review

PRAISE FOR HOW THE BROKEN LEAD THE BLIND

"There is an insistent rhythm in everything Matt Bell writes. Not the thudding hammer blows of fraudulent drama, not the drip of leaking satire, certainly not the jolly click and tap of a story that could be--ought to have been--texted. It's gentle and enormously powerful: the beating of a heart."

—Gary Amdahl, author of Visigoth and I Am Death

"Throughout the collection, Bell… uses propulsive, almost metrical language—often with skillful short sentences—to create the sense of foreboding and imminent surprise we have come to expect from flash fiction."

—Steven Wingate, The Short Review

"Matt Bell can do what so many fiction writers can't: Matt Bell can make anything happen."

—Michael Kimball, author of Dear Everybody

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Matt Bell is also the author of two chapbooks, The Collectors (Caketrain Press) and How the Broken Lead the Blind (Willows Wept Press). His fiction has appeared in over seventy literary magazines, including Conjunctions, Hayden's Ferry Review, Willow Springs, Unsaid, and American Short Fiction, and has been selected for inclusion in leading anthologies such as Best American Mystery Stories 2010 and Best American Fantasy 2. His book reviews and critical essays have appeared in publications like The Los Angeles Times, American Book Review, and The Quarterly Conversation. He is also the editor of the literary journal The Collagist and the series editor of Dzanc's Best of the Web anthology series. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with his wife Jessica. For more information, visit www.mdbell.com.