A Tree or a Person or a Wall: Stories

by Matt Bell Narrated by Karen Chilton, Andrea Gallo, Andrew Garman, T. Ryder Smith

Overview

A Tree or a Person or a Wall gives us Matt Bell at his most inventive and uncanny: parents and children, murderers and monsters, wild renditions of the past, and acute takes on the present, all of which build to a virtuoso reimagining of our world. A 19th-century minister builds an elaborate motor that will bring about the Second Coming. A man with rough hands locks a boy in a room with an albino ape. An apocalyptic army falls under a veil of forgetfulness. The story of Red Riding Hood is run through a potentially endless series of iterations. A father invents an elaborate, consuming game for his hospitalized son. Indexes, maps, a checkered shirt buried beneath a blanket of snow: they are scattered through these pages as clues to mysteries that may never be solved, lingering evidence of the violence and unknowability of the world. A Tree or a Person or a Wall brings together Bell's previously published shorter fiction-the story collection How They Were Found and the acclaimed novella Cataclysm Baby-along with seven dark and disturbing new stories, to create a collection of singular power.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

07/11/2016
Bell’s (Scrapper) collection packages 17 stories with one novella, “Cataclysm Baby.” These fables plumb the depths of human longing and depravity. In the titular story, which opens the collection, a man with rough hands—it’s implied he has done violence in his past—holds a boy prisoner with an albino ape in a small room, where the boy begins to transform. This dark coming-of-age tale sets the tone for the rest of the collection. Each story is infused with the sense that there is something unseen and dangerous in the distance. In “His Last Great Gift,” a spiritualist preacher visited by the ghosts of America’s Founding Fathers directs the creation of an intricate motor that will usher in a new utopia. “A Long Walk with Only Chalk to Mark the Way” is a retelling of Theseus’s battle with the Minotaur, taking place in a hospital with a dying child. The settings, and Bell’s sentences, reflect the shadowy emotional tenor of the collection: murky lakes, a mysterious satellite tower. The total effect is a collection that resonates like a tuning fork, lingering after the book is closed. Agent: Kirby Kim, Janklow & Nesbit Associates. (Sept.)

From the Publisher

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

"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

"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

"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

Library Journal

08/01/2016
This is a collection of powerful and disturbing stories, seven of which haven't been published before, from acclaimed writer Bell, whose novel Scrapper is a 2016 Michigan Notable Book. Told in a mythic, omniscient voice, some of these pieces read like cruel fairy tales—"Wolf Parts" is in fact a dark riff on Little Red Riding Hood. Often, the theme is about absence, whether of body parts, an explained motive for bizarre turns of events, or even a specific narrator, as in "For You We Are Holding," in which the protagonist blends with a multiplicity of city dwellers, almost like a unified organism. Several stories ride the boundary between fiction and semantics. "The Stations" is a close reading of a little boy's first lie; in "The Cartographer," words replace map symbols to become narrative. In the titular piece, a boy is a permanent captive in a room with an albino ape. Deprived of language, the boy struggles to retain the meaning of words. Imagine a tale from Lydia Davis on a bad trip. VERDICT These intellectually provoking works will please readers of literary fiction who like their stories smart and edgy.—Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

Kirkus Reviews

2016-06-22
A clutch of stories with a flavor of the experimental, the apocalyptic, and often both.Bell's debut novel, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods (2013), was an extended riff on origin myths with prose that foregrounded the loping lyricism of the title. Much of this collection is written in a similar mode, though the mood is usually darker. "Wolf Parts" is a visceral rewrite of "Little Red Riding Hood" that focuses on those big teeth the wolf has, "The Migration" is a collective dispatch about outrage and riots after the murder of a pregnant immigrant, and "The Collectors" revisits the grim tale of the Collyer brothers, hoarders found dead in their overstuffed New York home. That last story is just one example of how much Bell enjoys exploring the moments when rationality slackens into madness, and he's superb at it in "His Last Great Gift," about a preacher who persuades his congregation that he's invented a crackpot "New Motor" that will improve society. And "Dredge" is a pitch-perfect noir about a troubled man who keeps a drowned woman's body in his basement freezer. Bell has a try-anything attitude that makes him an important emerging writer, but not every experiment comes off. The gambit of "An Index of How Our Family Was Killed"—its paragraphs are arranged alphabetically—mutes the intended atmosphere of loss and destruction. Likewise, the novella Cataclysm Baby, built on 26 vignettes about lost children in a degrading world, is overly engineered and clogged with portentous phrasings ("none remaining to bear our future forth except those afloat beyond the last lands of the West…"). Admirable efforts to strip familiarity and sentiment from stories of humanity at its worst, albeit with hit-or-miss execution.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171314309
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	09/13/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

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