FC2 has selected Matt Bell as the final judge for the 2023 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. Matt Bell is the author most recently of the novel Appleseed (a New York Times Notable Book) and the craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, and revision. He is also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, Orion, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.
Always Crashing in the Same Car
A prismatic, imaginative exploration of David Bowie’s last days
White Wedding
An enigmatic woman wanders from a pleasure mansion to a backyard wedding, upending the lives of everyone present
Swimming With Dead Stars
A hypnotic sojourn of planetary proportions through the terrestrial contingencies of bodies, health, poverty, and salvation
Ascension
A visually stunning narrative of three eras in humankind’s vexed relationship with nature
My Haunted Home
Meditations on the ways grief is felt and harvested — the funny, the sorrowful, the surreal, and the unmentionable
Benefit Street
A universal story of exile, of the refugee and emigrant, and of all those displaced who can reconstruct a sense of home only by weaving a new fabric of the imagination