We are excited to have visiting author David Matlin reading from his latest collection, Up Fish Creek Road and Other Stories, this Wednesday, March 26, 2014 at 7:30 p.m. in the Hammes Campus Bookstore.
Matlin is an accomplished novelist, poet, and essayist. His collections of poetry and prose include China Beach, Dressed in Protective Fashion, and Fontana’s Mirror. Matlin’s first novel, How The Night Is Divided, was nominated for a National Book Circle Critics Award. His book Prisons: Inside the New America from Vernooykill Creek to Abu Graib focuses on the spread of the American prison industry on a planet-wide basis. And his work in It Might Do Well with Strawberries extends the previous book’s examination of prisons into an investigation of violence in American culture.
Up Fish Creek Road and Other Stories depicts American history as an interweaving of language and the environment. The book takes up the grand social and political commitments of the nineteenth century without resorting to pleas for nostalgia. Irini Spanidou, author of God’s Snake, writes of the book: “Though these stories are anchored in events unfolding in contemporary times, their power and beauty rest on Matlin’s rhapsodic evocation of America’s past. It is all that has vanished—the majestic wilderness of the land and the heroic spirit of the men who inhabited it, Native Americans and early settlers alike—that comes fully, hauntingly to life, making the present appear eviscerated, not just diminished. The poetic cadence of the prose and the grandiloquent length of the sentences having a hypnotic effect, as all Matlin’s work, Up Fish Creek Road, reads like a dream: there is no linear time; there is no continuous space; depicted events have the mystique and ineffable grandeur of myth. Being dreamlike, the sense of reality is at times incoherent, but the images are always stunning and the sensuous, tactile language that paints them, magnificent.”
The reading is free and open to the public.
Hope to see you there,
Dev