Matt Bell

"In the vein of Neal Stephenson and Jeff VanderMeer, an epic speculative novel from Young Lions Fiction Award-finalist Matt Bell, a ... book that explores climate change, manifest destiny, humanity's unchecked exploitation of natural resources, and the small but powerful magic contained within every single apple"--

A Novel

Appleseed

Escaping the busy confusion of his homeland and moving to an almost-uninhabited lakeshore where he plans on living simply and raising a family, a man descends into rage, obsession and an abstract sense of reality when his wife suffers multiple miscarriages. A first novel by the author of How They Were Found.

In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

They say writing is rewriting. So why does the second part get such short shrift? Refuse To Be Done will guide you through every step of the novel writing process, from getting started on those first pages to the last tips for making your final draft even tighter and stronger. From lauded writer and teacher Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done is encouraging and intensely practical, focusing always on specific rewriting tasks, techniques, and activities for every stage of the process. You won't find bromides here about the "the writing Muse." Instead, Bell breaks down the writing process in three sections. In the first, Bell shares a bounty of tactics, all meant to push you through the initial conception and get words on the page. The second focuses on reworking the narrative through outlining, modeling, and rewriting. The third and final section offers a layered approach to polishing through a checklist of operations, breaking the daunting project of final revisions into many small, achievable tasks. Whether you are a first time novelist or a veteran writer, you will find an abundance of strategies here to help motivate you and shake up your revision process, allowing you to approach your work, day after day and month after month, with fresh eyes and sharp new tools.

Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts

Fiction. Beset with environmental disaster, animal-like children, and the failure of traditional roles, the twenty-six fathers of CATACLYSM BABY raise their desperate voices to reveal the strange stations of frustrated parenthood, to proclaim familial thrashings against the fading light of our exhausted planet, its glory grown wild again. As the known world disappears, these beleaguered and all-too-breakable men cling ever tighter to the duties of an unrecoverable past, even as their children rush ahead, evolve away. Unflinching in the face of apocalypse and unblinking before the complicated gaze of parental love, Matt Bell's CATACLYSM BABY is a powerful chronicle of our last days, and of the tentative graces that might fill the hours of our dusk.

Cataclysm Baby

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, lingering 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.

Stories

A Tree Or a Person Or a Wall

Features thirteen stories that describe situations that go disastrously awry for individuals ranging from investigators and siblings to priests and Red Riding Hood.

How They Were Found

The Boys in the Band’s debut was revolutionary for its fictional but frank presentation of a male homosexual subculture in Manhattan. Based on Mart Crowley’s hit Off-Broadway play from 1968, the film’s two-hour running time approximates real time, unfolding at a birthday party attended by nine men whose language, clothing, and behavior evoke a range of urban gay “types.” Although various popular critics, historians, and film scholars over the years have offered cursory acknowledgment of the film’s importance, more substantive research and analysis have been woefully lacking. The film’s neglect among academics belies a rich and rewarding object of study. The Boys in the Band merits not only the close reading that should accompany such a well-made text but also recognition as a landmark almost ideally situated to orient us amid the highly complex, shifting cultural terrain it occupied upon its release—and has occupied since. The scholars assembled here bring an invigorating variety of methods to their considerations of this singular film. Coming from a wide range of academic disciplines, they pose and answer questions about the film in remarkably different ways. Cultural analysis, archival research, interviews, study of film traditions, and theoretical framing intensify their revelatory readings of the film. Many of the essays take inventive approaches to longstanding debates about identity politics, and together they engage with current academic work across a variety of fields that include queer theory, film theory, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, and Marxist theory. Addressing The Boys in the Band from multiple perspectives, these essays identify and draw out the film’s latent flashpoints—aspects of the film that express the historical, cinematic, and queer-political crises not only of its own time, but also of today. The Boys in the Band is an accessible touchstone text in both queer studies and film studies. Scholars and students working in the disciplines of film studies, queer studies, history, theater, and sociology will surely find the book invaluable and a shaping influence on these fields in the coming years.

Flashpoints of Cinema, History, and Queer Politics

The Boys in the Band

A man embarks on a desperate quest for redemption in a devastated Detroit, in this novel that “has the feel of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road . . . Powerful” (Publishers Weekly). Detroit has descended into ruin. Kelly scavenges for scrap metal from the hundred thousand abandoned buildings in a part of the city known as “the zone”—an increasingly wild landscape where one day he finds something far more valuable than the copper he’s come to steal: a kidnapped boy, crying out for rescue. Briefly, Kelly is celebrated as a hero. But even after he has brought the boy to safety, he is driven to secretly avenge this crime and solve the mystery behind the kidnapping—a task that will take him deeper into the zone, and into a confrontation with his own past and long-buried traumas. From the acclaimed author of In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, Scrapper is a devastating reimagining of one of America’s greatest cities, its beautiful architecture, its lost houses, shuttered factories, boxing gyms, and storefront churches. With precise, powerful prose, it asks: What do we owe for our crimes, even those we’ve committed to protect the people we love?

Scrapper

Preparing Your Kids for a Lifetime of God-Honoring Money Management

Trusted

Award-winning novelist wrestles with his love of video games, D&D, and all things nerdy in this poignant, observant book.

Boss Fight Books #8

Baldur's Gate II

The Collectors

Justin Sirois

Scott Garson

Andrew Kozma

Sarah McCartt-Jackson

NANO Fiction (print ISSN 1935-844X; digital ISSN 2160-939X) is non-profit literary journal that publishes flash fiction—a form of short story also known as micro fiction, micro narrative, micro-story, microrrelatos, postcard fiction, the short short, the short short story, kürzestgeschichten, and sudden fiction—of 300 words or fewer. Featuring twenty to thirty authors in each issue, NANO Fiction has roots that draw from Aesop’s Fables and Zen Koans. Notable practitioners of this prose form include Lydia Davis, Franz Kafka, Italo Calvino, Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, Naguib Mahfouz, and Linor Goralik, among others. This issue of NANO Fiction features works by: Nin Andrews, Matt Bell, Chas Carey,Doug Paul Case, Sarah Eaton, Erika Eckart, Scott Garson, Luke Geddes, Greg Gerke, Nathan Good, Anya Groner, Andrew Kozma, Daniel Lawless, Charles Lennox, Sara Lippmann, Kirsty Logan, Sean Lovelace, Sarah McCartt-Jackson, Shawn Andrew Mitchell, Cheyenne Nimes, Laurie Nye, Carrie Oeding, Michael Palmer, Hannah Pass, Marie Potoczny, Matt Prater, Alissa Riccardelli, Jim Ruland, Nick Sansone, Kathryn Scanlan, Gregory Sherl, Katie Jean Shinkle, Justin Sirois, Eugenia Tsutsumi, and Desmond Kon.

NANO Fiction Volume 4 Number 1

Robert Lopez

Patty Yumi Cottrell

Sarah Rose Etter

Tom Whalen

Lindsey Drager

Jessica Alexander

Meghan Privitello

Alan Sondheim

C. Dylan Bassett

A. T. Grant

Emma Sovich

Joseph Aguilar

N. Michelle AuBuchon

Ruth Baumann

Eric Lloyd Blix

Trevor Calvert

Hunter Choate

Benjamin Clemenzi-Allen

Jon Cone

Stella Corso

Tim Earley

Knar Gavin

Pamela Gesualdi

Lindsay Herko

Matthew Mahaney

Elizabeth Mikesch

Thirii Myint

Eleanor Perry

W. R. Porter

Jessica Richardson

Boyd Spahr

Adam Strauss

Sara Veglahn

The eleventh issue of Caketrain, featuring new work from Joseph Aguilar, Jessica Alexander, N. Michelle AuBuchon, C Dylan Bassett, Ruth Baumann, Matt Bell, Eric Lloyd Blix, Trevor Calvert, Hunter Choate, Benjamin Clemenzi-Allen, Jon Cone, Stella Corso, Patty Yumi Cottrell, Lindsey Drager, Tim Earley, Sarah Rose Etter, Knar Gavin, Pamela Gesualdi, A.T. Grant, Lindsay Herko, Robert Lopez, Matthew Mahaney, Elizabeth Mikesch, Muxxi, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint, Eleanor Perry, W.R. Porter, Meghan Privitello, Jessica Richardson, Alan Sondheim, Emma Sovich, Boyd Spahr, Adam Strauss, Sara Veglahn, Tom Whalen. Edited by Amanda Raczkowski, Joseph Reed, Tanner Hadfield and Katy Mongeau.

Caketrain

The Bible tells us that our mouths are to be fountains of life, but our day-to-day interactions prove otherwise. So how do we address our hearts as well as our words? This book explores the impact our words can have and helps us develop a filter to hold back things we shouldn't say.

Get Past the Crisis, Find Some Breathing Space, Ditch the Debt, Position Yourself for Lasting Success

Matt Bell's Money Strategies for Tough Times

The Rounders and the Tallers

The Jellies and the Crunchers is a tale of a town sharply divided by their own personal choice, in this case, what to eat and how to eat it! The two groups of town folk become more and more critical and angry with each other, which leads to a very crazy type of confrontation that will change the town forever. It takes the heart of a brave little girl to try something new and lead the town back together again. Come read about this quirky and interesting town and the even more interesting people groups that make it up.

The Jellies and the Crunchers

On a distant planet, there are two types of cats, the Thinkers and the Jumpers. Conflict arises due to their differences, which send them all, eventually, on an interplanetary journey. This journey will forever affect the future of all cats and change mankind's history as well.

Crazy Cats From Outer Space

More money, more stuff Money and things—the more we have, the more we want. Of course, we all know that “More” is a game that can’t be won. No matter how much we get, it’s never enough. But deep down inside, part of us clings to the hope that the next time will be different—with a little bit more we’ll be happier. So we keep up the pursuit. Fortunately, there’s a better way to manage our money and our lives: Turn toward home. Just as the prodigal son wandered from home and squandered his inheritance, so have many of us wandered from the financial home God prepared for us. In this inspiring and instructive book, financial writer and speaker Matt Bell helps you redirect your use of money to meet your deepest longings—to turn toward the life God intends for you.

The Proven Path to Uncommon Financial Success

Money, Purpose, Joy

You have the creative edge! Imagine walking into a boardroom, sales meeting, or investor presentation sustained by the peace of the Lord, driven by profound joy in His presence, and empowered by a hopeful expectation of His blessing. Through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, followers of Jesus possess the greatest power in the universe! With this amazing power comes a profound responsibility: to lead the forefront of modern business and innovation for the glory of God. The Kingdom-Empowered Entrepreneur will help you do just that. This book is a personal boot camp for Christian entrepreneurs and business people. Matt Bell takes you through Biblical principles that are essential for every business owner to know and practice. Each section includes prayers and exercises to activate your faith and unlock revelation for the marketplace. This book will impart useful Biblical insights on your role as an entrepreneur, igniting your spiritual passion and fueling your business pursuits.

Awakening Your Supernatural Edge

The Kingdom-Empowered Entrepreneur

Alexis Comber

Smarter Farming: New Approaches for Improved Monitoring, Measurement and Management of Agricultural Production and Farming Systems

Matt Bell

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