How They Were Found - Softcover

Bell, Matt

Softcover

ISBN 10: 098215125X ISBN 13: 9780982151259

Publisher: Keyhole Press, 2010

Synopsis

Reminiscent 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

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 feels 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

In this debut collection, 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 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, 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.
Contains the story "Dredge," selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2010.

About this title

About the Author

Matt Bell is the author of How They Were Found, published in October 2010, as well as three chapbooks, Wolf Parts, The Collectors, and How the Broken Lead the Blind. His fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Hayden's Ferry Review, Willow Springs, Unsaid, and American Short Fiction, and has been selected for inclusion in anthologies such as Best American Mystery Stories 2010 and Best American Fantasy 2. His book reviews and critical essays have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, American Book Review, and The Quarterly Conversation.

Review

"Body toll notwithstanding, How They Were Found is anything but bleak. For one thing, there's the prose: generous, urgent, rhythmic." --The Believer

"Bell knows how to keep his world in check, his every word balanced against another, delicately, like a system of weights."
--The Rumpus

"Bell has built a national reputation completely outside the support system of New York publishing, on the strength of his stories and novellas. He is that rare sort of writer the reader would recognize even if published anonymously." --HTMLGiant

"The characters are doomed. The stories are bleak. Yet they are written so beautifully that they become something else: an exuberant example of the power of language to transport and transform." --Shelf Unbound

"Bell, here, at the start of his career, displays the kind of intelligence, self-awareness, and care with regard to his prose that suggests he may become a major talent." --Jeff Vandermeer

About this edition

• Publisher: Keyhole Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 098215125X
• ISBN 13: 9780982151259
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 256