Matt Bell
MATT BELL’s debut novel In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods was published in 2013 by Soho Press. He teaches in the M.F.A. program at Northern Michigan University.
The worlds Bernheimer’s fairy tales create are mirrors and prisms, reflecting and refracting other fairy-tale worlds that have come before, but they are also each worlds all her own, animated by the power of her singular voice, her unmistakable imagination.
By Matt Bell
In B & Me, Hallman adds to the body of creative criticism by reading Nicholson Baker’s work end to end, responding to it both personally and critically in a book modeled on Baker’s own U and I, which similarly engaged John Updike.
Josh Weil is the author of the novel The Great Glass Sea and the novella collection The New Valley (Grove Atlantic, 2009). A New York Times Editors' Choice, The New Valley won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, the New Writers Award from the Great Lakes Colleges Association, and a “5 Under 35” Award from the National Book Foundation.
Made to Break is narrated by AJ, one of five friends who headed to a cabin near Lake Tahoe for New Year’s Eve 1996. In short order, they’re stranded in the cabin by a car accident and a storm that leaves one friend severely injured and the rest of them stranded and cut off.
Bianca Stone is the author of Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Tin House/Octopus Books, 2014), several poetry and poetry–comic chapbooks, and is also the illustrator of Antigonick, a collaboration with Anne Carson (New Directions, 2012).
Christopher Merkner is the author of the story collection The Rise and Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic (Coffee House Press, 2014). His work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Cincinnati Review, Fairy Tale Review, Gettysburg Review, New Orleans Review, and Best American Mystery Stories, and he teaches creative writing at West Chester University. The stories in his debut collection are formally playful in their interrogation of Midwestern privilege and parental prerogatives, each rendering the familiar strange again so that we might see it anew.
The Last Days of California follows the family of 15-year-old Jess as they leave their home in the South to drive to California to await the rapture prophesied to come in just four days. This is a coming of age story hurried into the last gasp before a supposedly coming end, with Miller’s sharp prose moving us fast across our apocalypse-obsessed country, this roadside America of faith and faithlessness, angst and love, rest stops and hotel pools and Waffle House.
