Cataclysm Baby

“Matt Bell has built a national reputation on his own terms, completely outside the support system of New York publishing, on the strength of his stories and novellas, which are wholly original and singularly his own. He is that rare sort of writer whose work the reader would recognize even if it were published anonymously. It is formally daring, high-stakes, languaged-up stuff.”

—Kyle Minor, HTMLGiant

“With How They Were Found, Bell joins the company of the great fabulists like Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and Italo Calvino, or closer to home, the American masters, Steven Millhauser, John Crowley, and Thomas Pynchon. These tales are mysterious, recondite without being just intellectual exercises, extravagant and fanciful, and ultimately winning. And [his] control of his material is imposing and his spectrum often dazzling.”

—Corey Mesler, American Book Review

“Body toll notwithstanding, How They Were Found is anything but bleak. For one thing, there’s the prose: generous, urgent, rhythmic… his rhetorical repetitions echoing the events and obsessions on the page.”

—Reese Okyong Kwon, The Believer

“Bell doesn’t shy away from the ugliness of his character’s lives. Unlike many writers, he isn’t afraid to reveal their true natures… His fiction is honest and raw, frightening and powerful. His writing is lovely and moving—a perfect pairing for the grisly moments his protagonists face.”

—Jennifer Taylor, Bookslut

“In narratives that feel almost uncomfortably honest, Bell exposes unusual acts of desperation, uncovering raw, new representations of heartache and hunger… No less original or thought-provoking than contemporary fabulist stalwarts like Aimee Bender or Etgar Keret, [he] expands the scope of experimental writing.”

—V. Jo Hsu, Fiction Writers Review

“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… so rewarding and resonant.”

—Matthew Derby, Super Flat Times: Stories

“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, Omnivoracious