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Profiles and Interviews TV: Greater Boston with Emily Rooney TV: Al Jazeera America’s The Stream via YouTube Radio: Dinner Party Download Radio: Houston Matters with Paige Phelps Radio: OPB State of Wonder with April Baer and Simon Tam Radio: OPB State of Wonder with April Baer and Simon Tam Radio: The Mixed Experience with Heidi Durrow Radio: This Week in Blackness AfterDark with N’Jaila Rhee, Jenn Fang, & Arthur Chu Radio: Adoption Perspectives with Rebecca Vahle Radio: Other People with Brad Listi Radio: SummerBooks with Renee Nicholson and Natalie Sypolt Radio: Gazillion Voices Podcast with Kevin Vollmers Syndicated Interview: Go Away with . . . with Jae-Ha Kim Writer-in-Residence for July at Necessary Fiction 32 Essential Asian-American Writers You Need to Be Reading at Buzzfeed Interview with Matthew Salesses at Hyphen The Rumpus Interview with Matthew Salesses Q&A with Author Matthew Salesses at Giant Robot The Books We Teach 6: Interview with Matthew Salesses at Ploughshares Leader Matthew Salesses Publishes New Novel at Putney Student Travel An-Ya Contributors Up-Front: Matthew Salesses Perpetual Child Anthology interview: Matthew Salesses Asian Artist Profile at Read My Blog Please “I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying: An Interview with Matthew Salesses in Heavy Feather Review Self-interview in The Nervous Breakdown “Novel in Flashes: Josh Denslow Talks to Matthew Salesses,” at Flash Fiction Chronicles “A Conversation with Matthew Salesses,” at Necessary Fiction Featured Writer at Atticus Review. Emerson College Alumni Profile. “An Interview with Matthew Salesses,” at Read Write Story “Five Questions with Matthew Salesses,” in NANO Fiction. “Death Match Victors: New Works by Elizabeth Searle and Matthew Salesses,” profile in the Weekly Dig. “Work by Day, Write by Night,” profile in the Harvard Gazette. “Fireside Chat with Matthew Salesses,” at PLUMB. Profile in I Am Korean American “Innovators in Publishing: Matthew Salesses and The Good Men Project,” interview at Submittable. “Q&A with Matthew Salesses,” in Fringe Q&A for Cousins Reading Series Dark Sky Magazine‘s Spotlight On The Collagist contributor interview (2) Ask the Author in PANK Matthew Salesses Recommends… in Poets & Writers Book & Interview Series: Contemporary Catholic Literature at The Fine Delight * Praise for The Hundred-Year Flood Best of September, Literature and Fiction 17 Awesome New Books You Need to Read This Summer 19 Awesome New Books You Need to Read This Fall 9 Must-Reads (Fall) Buzzy Fall Books Best of August Summer Book Guide Summer Reads “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.” “Salesses delivers an immersive novel about identity, myths, and ghosts. . . This is an engulfing read.” “This beautiful debut novel by Matthew Salesses is much like that flood—epic and devastating and full of natural majesty.” “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.” “A filmic, fast-moving, disjunctive ride . . . The Hundred-Year Flood is the novel to read right this moment.” “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.” “The Hundred-Year Flood is a vivid, cunning, compelling narrative about inheritance and forgiveness. A wonderful debut.” “An exquisite, unforgettable book about the extraordinary demands of identity and the transformative power of art and love.” “The Hundred-Year Flood is a beautiful, transporting novel that lays bare the heartbreak and loss of the world while never forgetting its magic.” “The Hundred-Year Flood is an incredible literary achievement . . . a force to be reckoned with and an absolute pleasure to read.” “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.” “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.” “Salesses writes in a style that seems simultaneously whimsical and tough. He’s a dazzling new talent.” “Above all, The Hundred-Year Flood is beautifully written, it feels very intense and intimate.” 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.” “Poetic, unforgettable, shot through with fury and yearning… captures in clear and chilling flashes our capacity for the cruelty and tenderness of love.” “[Reveals] both the people we have been, and the better people we might be lucky enough to one day hope to become.” “The messiness of life, family, love in its myriad complex forms… a pointillist masterpiece.” “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.” “So bold and yet so intriguingly elusive.” “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.” “Lovely and heartbreaking and tender and wicked all at the same time.” “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.” “A novel that manages, in few words, to devastate with its honesty and fearlessness.” “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.” “The novel acts as a beautiful portrait of self-discovery, and does so through an innovative narrative frame.” “Salesses deftly delivers a story that is at turns sad, funny, heartbreaking, and hopeful, but always open and honest about the messiness of life.” “I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying is about caring for others when you can’t manage to care for yourself.” “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.” 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. Praise for The Last Repatriate “Salesses knows how to write a fine sentence—fine in the traditional sense: well-wrought, attended-to, and unexpected.” “Every word is painstakingly chosen… The cinematic tone is perfect.” Best of 2011 “Occasionally I’ll find myself reading a book and thinking ‘This is so important right now.'” “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.” “Concisely illustrates how war destroys individuals.” “The gorgeous prose and gripping plot… testify to our strangeness, resilience, and capacity for love.” “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.” Holiday Survival List 2011 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.” “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.” “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.” “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.” “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.” “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.” “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.” “Salesses makes it happen—confidently and with style.” “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.” “These little tales speak to the strokes of luck and circumstance that shape our destinies.” “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.” “I want you to read this book.” “Highly recommend it!” |