A Tree or a Person or a Wall: Stories

Praise for A Tree or a Person or a Wall: Stories

A Chicago Review of Books Best of 2016

“A specific kind of focused pain forms the language of Bell’s tales… These stories take “everyday” horrors like hoarding, missing children, and cultural unrest, and saturate them with the kind of rich, layered text that make the works of Tolkien and George R. R. Martin so enduring.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Both [explores] new worlds and [does] unexpected things with language, structure, and style along the way… telling stories of surreal visitations, obsessions, and moments when the nature of reality becomes decidedly ambiguous. They’re memorable and haunting in equal measure.”
—Tobias Carroll for Tor.com

“Bell joins a class of genre-blind writers that include Karen Russell, China Miéville and Emily St. John Mandel… Doom-inflected poetics aside, Bell tells deeply human stories that resonate in odd, sad ways.”
—Shelf Awareness

“Matt Bell has become a force in American literature and this is in no small part due to his flexibility in style… A Tree or a Person or a Wall is perhaps the most comprehensive example of his stylistic diversity.” 
—Vol1 Brooklyn

“The last time Matt Bell released a book with a longish compound title (In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods) I was blown away, and this collection of his short fiction (A Tree or a Person or a Wall) was no different.”
—The Chicago Review of Books

“These fables plumb the depths of human longing… a collection that resonates like a tuning fork, lingering after the book is closed.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A clutch of stories with a flavor of the experimental, the apocalyptic, and often both…Admirable efforts to strip familiarity and sentiment from stories of humanity at its worst.” 
—Kirkus Reviews

“Told in a mythic, ­omniscient voice, some of these pieces read like cruel fairy tales… Imagine a tale from Lydia Davis on a bad trip… smart and edgy.” 
—Library Journal

“There is nothing remotely close to filler within A Tree or a Person or a Wall… each sentence, and paragraph, are the type that you want to read a second or third time.”
—Dan Wickett, Founder, Emerging Writers Network and Dzanc Books

“Matt Bell blurs the often fine lines between literary and genre fictions, allegory and horror, magical realism and bizarro… Bell’s tales are all told in a distinctly confident and haunting voice, rendering an unforgettable reading experience every time.”
—The New York Journal of Books

Praise for Matt Bell

“Mr. Bell has written a gripping, grisly tale of a husband’s descent into and ultimate emergence from some kind of personal hell.”
—The New York Times

“Matt Bell’s sentences are glorious: sinuous and darkly magical, they are taproots of the strange.”
—Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies

“In extraordinary language, with deep feeling, Matt Bell has crafted a baby name book for the apocalypse, a gorgeous, brilliant, often darkly hilarious and always moving novella . . . I loved this book and want to recommend it to every human parent and child I know.”
—Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!

“It’s hard to imagine a book more difficult to pull off, but Bell proves as self-assured as he is audacious . . . One of the smartest meditations on the subjects of love, family and marriage in recent years.”
—NPR

“For readers weary of literary fiction that dutifully obeys the laws of nature, here’s a story that stirs the Brothers Grimm and Salvador Dalí with its claws . . . As gorgeous as it is devastating.”
—The Washington Post