Matt Bell: 5 books

“Blurs the often fine lines between literary and genre fictions, allegory and horror, magical realism and bizarro . . . An unforgettable reading experience” (The New York Journal of Books). A nineteenth-century minister builds an elaborate motor that will bring about the Second Coming....

“The book is heartily significant, featuring work that is sometimes surprising, sometimes frustrating and sometimes exhilaratingnot unlike the Web itself.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review“There is good work here. Perhaps that’s all that needs to be said.”—Fiction Writers Review

A man embarks on a desperate quest for redemption in a devastated Detroit, in this novel that “has the feel of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road . . . Powerful” (Publishers Weekly). Detroit has descended into ruin. Kelly scavenges for scrap metal from the hundred thousand abandoned buildings...

In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods tells the story of a newly married couple who take up a lonely existence in the title's mythical location. In this blank and barren plot far from the world they've known, they mean to start the family the unnamed husband wants so obsessively....

Is political theory political enough? Or does a tendency toward abstraction, idealization, moralism, and utopianism leave contemporary political theory out of touch with real politics as it actually takes place, and hence unable to speak meaningfully to or about our world? Realist political thought,...