Press

“What carries us through the novel is Salesses’ gift for language: here is a meditative, poetic, modern fable crafted in haunting bursts of impressionistic prose.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Salesses delivers an immersive novel about identity, myths, and ghosts. . . This is an engulfing read.”
—Publisher’s Weekly

“This beautiful debut novel by Matthew Salesses is much like that flood—epic and devastating and full of natural majesty.”
—Roxane Gay, author of An Untamed State and Bad Feminist

“The Hundred-Year Flood yanks you off your feet, whipping you along on a brilliantly crafted adventure. . . Matthew Salesses is a new force of nature.”
—Mat Johnson, author of Loving Day

“A filmic, fast-moving, disjunctive ride . . . The Hundred-Year Flood is the novel to read right this moment.”
—Robert Boswell, author of Tumbledown and The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards

“This is a phenomenally engrossing novel, cast in prose that is at once searing and poetic, and Matthew Salesses is a once in a lifetime talent.”
—Laura van den Berg, author of The Isle of Youth and Find Me

“The Hundred-Year Flood is a vivid, cunning, compelling narrative about inheritance and forgiveness. A wonderful debut.”
—Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy

“An exquisite, unforgettable book about the extraordinary demands of identity and the transformative power of art and love.”
—Catherine Chung, author ofForgotten Country

“The Hundred-Year Flood is a beautiful, transporting novel that lays bare the heartbreak and loss of the world while never forgetting its magic.”
—James Scott, author of The Kept

“The Hundred-Year Flood is an incredible literary achievement . . . a force to be reckoned with and an absolute pleasure to read.”
—Mario Alberto Zambrano, author of Loteria

“The Hundred-Year Flood captures life distilled to its purest, most potent form. I’ll be thinking about this story for many years to come.”
—Kirstin Chen, author of Soy Sauce for Beginners

“In this spellbinding novel, Matthew Salesses. . . succeeds in transporting the reader to a ghost Prague—a timeless, kaleidoscopic city layered with wonder and devastating sorrow.”
—Kenneth Calhoun, author of Black Moon

“Salesses writes in a style that seems simultaneously whimsical and tough. He’s a dazzling new talent.”
—Benjamin Rybeck, Local Houston

“Above all, The Hundred-Year Flood is beautifully written, it feels very intense and intimate.”
—Sally Akins, SA

Praise for I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying

“An absolute stunner of a novel… as if to say: This, this is life! And we are all, in one way or another, survivors.”
—Kathy Fish, author of Together We Can Bury It

“Poetic, unforgettable, shot through with fury and yearning… captures in clear and chilling flashes our capacity for the cruelty and tenderness of love.”
—Catherine Chung, author of Forgotten Country

“[Reveals] both the people we have been, and the better people we might be lucky enough to one day hope to become.”
—Matt Bell, author of In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods

“The messiness of life, family, love in its myriad complex forms… a pointillist masterpiece.”
—Marie Myung-Ok Lee, author of Somebody’s Daughter

“Provocative, beautiful, and at times, brutally raw… these vignettes build with tension and trepidation, until we, like the members of this reluctant, fractured family, realize the weight, burden and comfort that only comes from finally belonging.”
—Aimee Phan, author of The Reeducation of Cherry Truong

“So bold and yet so intriguingly elusive.”
—Peter Tieryas Liu, HTMLGIANT

“Salesses is a practitioner of the art of flash fiction who created 115 short works that each have an interior narrative arc and also come together as a novel.”
—Celeste Sollod, Baltimore Style

“Lovely and heartbreaking and tender and wicked all at the same time.”
—Lori Hettler, The Next Best Book Club Blog, 4 stars

“It takes guts to put everything into a few sentences per page. I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying provides laughter and heartache. The novel’s pieces connect quickly and concisely, but you will think about each of them, and the sentences that compose them, for a long time afterward.”
—Peter Fontaine, NANO Fiction

“A novel that manages, in few words, to devastate with its honesty and fearlessness.”
—Jonathan Crowl, [PANK]

“Salesses didn’t choose an easy path, but he walked it well and honestly. His novel engages the reader while at the same time challenging ideas of what a novel can and should be.”
—Mike Tager, JMWW

“The novel acts as a beautiful portrait of self-discovery, and does so through an innovative narrative frame.”
—Tawnysha Greene, Sundress Publications

“Salesses deftly delivers a story that is at turns sad, funny, heartbreaking, and hopeful, but always open and honest about the messiness of life.”
—Gina Myers, Frontier Psychiatrist

“I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying is about caring for others when you can’t manage to care for yourself.”
—David Plick, Down and Out

“Not unlike burning through an entire season of some show available on Netflix because you are compelled so by the characters and by your own want, to know them, to understand them, to see how it all works out.”
—tinyprivatejet, via Land of Gazillion Adoptees

Deceptively simple on the outside, utterly complicated on the inside, Salesses’s I’m Not Saying I’m Just Saying masterfully wields the short-short form. His startling sentences reveal the intimacies and intricacies of one man’s shaky relationships.
—Angela Palm, BookTrib

Praise for The Last Repatriate

“Salesses knows how to write a fine sentence—fine in the traditional sense: well-wrought, attended-to, and unexpected.”
—Kyle Winkler, The Rumpus

“Every word is painstakingly chosen… The cinematic tone is perfect.”
—Josh Denslow, The Lit Pub

Best of 2011
—Amber Sparks, Big Other

“Occasionally I’ll find myself reading a book and thinking ‘This is so important right now.'”
—Alissa Nutting Looking Back at 2011, Heavy Feather Review

“I told myself, ‘Just because this is a short novella does not mean you are going to stay up late and read the whole thing at once.’ . . . And then I read the entire book at once.”
—Sara Habein, Word Riot

“Concisely illustrates how war destroys individuals.”
—Luis Jaramillo, The Brooklyn Rail

“The gorgeous prose and gripping plot… testify to our strangeness, resilience, and capacity for love.”
—Ethel Rohan, author of Cut Through the Bone

“A heartfelt tale that taps into our collective desire for a home we love (but might never see), and it only takes an hour or two to enjoy.”
—Ryan Brock, The Stage

Holiday Survival List 2011
—Kirby Johnson, NANO Fiction

Praise for Our Island of Epidemics

“Extended sickness, packed-in sexspace, a she-god named Sam, stone sandwiches, ganglions, weight gain, dookers, spells of fainting: this book about making a book is full of hell, though a giddy kind of hell you might like to read aloud to someone loving, to share its magic logic, its dragonfruit, its rare disease.”
—Blake Butler, author of There Is No Year

“I loved this book. Matthew Salesses creates a new world and pours his entire imagination into it. There’s so much magic. I felt it on my fingertips while reading. I’ll say it again – I loved this book.”
—Shane Jones, author of Light Boxes

“On Matthew Salesses’ strange and infectious Island, dragonfruit have wings and the aftertaste of fire, illness is freedom, dreams are shared, and interventions are staged to stop citizens’ obsessing. You may fall in love with these small stories of free will and fate, but they might not requite you. And while their epidemic of short term memory loss might make it impossible for them to remember you, you will recall them: magical and complex.”
—Kathleen Rooney, author of For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs

“One of the great feats of fiction is to create a world where anything can happen. Matthew Salesses has done this with Our Island of Epidemics and, in doing so, he has revealed the great difficulty of the human condition.”
—Michael Kimball, author of Us and Dear Everybody

“Unrequited love, dissociation, unstoppably growing hearts, extrasensitive hearing—these are just a few of the epidemics that strike the island at the center of Matthew Salesses’ dazzling collection. The voice of the island’s inhabitants is hypnotic, and Salesses’ exploration of the epidemics and their effect, of the ways we construct history and identity, are surprising and smart and richly, devastatingly human. With Our Island of Epidemics, Salesses has established himself as a brilliant new force in contemporary fiction. I loved this book, and I would gladly follow the author anywhere.”
—Laura van den Berg, author of What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

“In Our Island of Epidemics, Matthew Salesses conjures from the sea a nation populated by a people struck together by one universal affliction after another. This is a citizenry more unified than that of our own land, but also one whose members have nowhere to turn for aid from their various ailments, their short-term memory loss, their unrequited loves, their fits of magic and insomnia and shared dreams. It is only from within their ranks that they might find the means to prevail through a series of charming interventions and endless sincerity, and through the telling of their story, this one one you hold now in your hands, the fantastic tale of those longest and strangest years yet seen upon their island.”
—Matt Bell, author of How They Were Found

“Despite the plague of frustration and hardship that is Matthew Salesses’ Island of Epidemics, it’s a place I’d like to visit, just to live the language and ingenuity of its creator. Salesses is a crack shot in pinpointing how we all cope, nailing this microcosm of humanity within these little stories. They are all fantastic and hilarious and beautiful, well beyond their length, well beyond any island.”
—Michael G Czyzniejewski, author of Elephants in Our Bedroom

“Salesses makes it happen—confidently and with style.”
—Amber Sparks, Big Other

“Much like Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Our Island of Epidemics is richly imaginative in its variations, as we see how affliction after affliction affects these islanders. And, much like the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the strangeness is not really all that strange.”
—Gina Myers, New Pages

“These little tales speak to the strokes of luck and circumstance that shape our destinies.”
—Spencer Dew, decomP

“Despite being born in the post-millennial digital age, these stories could easily have sprung from the oral tradition of ancient Greece. One thinks of Odysseus stopping at strange islands on his voyage home from the Trojan War.”
—Nick Kocz, The Collagist

“I want you to read this book.”
—Vouched

“Highly recommend it!”
—Lantern Daily, The Paper Cave