Join us on a literary world trip!
Add this book to bookshelf
Grey
Write a new comment Default profile 50px
Grey
Subscribe to read the full book or read the first pages for free!
All characters reduced
A Tree or a Person or a Wall - Stories - cover

A Tree or a Person or a Wall - Stories

Matt Bell

Publisher: Soho Press

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

Summary

“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. 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.   Named one of the best books of the year by the Chicago Review of Books, A Tree or a Person or a Wall brings together Matt Bell’s acclaimed short 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 work of singular power.  
Available since: 09/13/2016.
Print length: 400 pages.

Other books that might interest you

  • The Beckoning Fair One - cover

    The Beckoning Fair One

    Oliver Onions

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    A classic ghost story of a haunted house, and the haunted man who lives in it.
    Show book
  • The Eyes - cover

    The Eyes

    Edith Wharton

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    A story of how individual destiny can be shaped and formed by mentors and friends. Culwin is a modern villain, whose crimes arise from holding his tongue at crucial moments, so that events further entangle themselves.
    Show book
  • Heart of Darkness - cover

    Heart of Darkness

    Joseph Conrad

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Heart of Darkness is a novella written by Joseph Conrad. It is widely regarded as a significant work of English literature and part of the Western canon. The story tells of Charles Marlow, an Englishman who took a foreign assignment from a Belgian trading company as a ferry-boat captain in Africa. Heart of Darkness exposes the myth behind colonization while exploring the three levels of darkness that the protagonist, Marlow, encounters--the darkness of the Congo wilderness, the darkness of the European's cruel treatment of the natives, and the unfathomable darkness within every human being for committing heinous acts of evil. Although Conrad does not give the name of the river, at the time of writing the Congo Free State, the location of the large and important Congo River, was a private colony of Belgium's King Leopold II. 
    Marlow is employed to transport ivory downriver. However, his more pressing assignment is to return Kurtz, another ivory trader, to civilization, in a cover-up. Kurtz has a reputation throughout the region. This symbolic story is a story within a story or frame narrative. It follows Marlow as he recounts from dusk through to late night, to a group of men aboard a ship anchored in the Thames Estuary his Congolese adventure. The passage of time and the darkening sky during the fictitious narrative-within-the-narrative parallel the atmosphere of the story.
    Show book
  • Artists On Art - A Short Story Volume - Stories about all manner of arts in both fun and scary settings - cover

    Artists On Art - A Short Story...

    H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe,...

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Art. The greatest standard bearer of what the human condition really is?  Or Emperor’s Clothes, cheap gimmicks displayed as all-knowing? 
    When it comes to writing we have our favourite authors.  But what of the authors themselves. What are they keen to write of? 
    For our classic authors; from Poe to Lovecraft, from Woolf to Fitzgerald art in their words, is something to be admired.  From many angles, many views, their stories, their characters interact with art and the consequences fall as they may.
    Show book
  • The Night Trevor's Soul Came Loose - A Short Ghost Story - cover

    The Night Trevor's Soul Came...

    Anna Abner

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    When a single gunshot shatters Lanie's life, she comes face to face with the spirit of her beloved. 
    Except Trevor's not dead.
    Show book
  • The Survivors of the Chancellor - cover

    The Survivors of the Chancellor

    Jules Verne

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    This novel from the author of Around the World in Eighty Days and Journey to the Center of the Earth captures the terror and tragedy of a shipwreck.   This 1875 novel portrays in devastating detail the final voyage of a British sailing ship, the Chancellor, in the form of a diary written by one of its passengers, J. R. Kazallon. Carrying eight travelers and twenty crew members, the Chancellor sets sail from Charleston, South Carolina. Nearly a month into its voyage, a fire breaks out in the cargo hold, initiating a tragic chain of events that will ultimately sink the ship and leave the survivors adrift on a raft in shark-infested waters.   “Verne in all wrote 55 novels and many of them predicted aspects of the world and science as it exists today. Other novels included describing space travel, floating cities, lost islands and more. Many of his themes and plots have become major influences on generations of authors and screenwriters ever since. If you have not read one of his books, find one of these or one of the fifty plus novels and give him a few hours of your time. You will find the escape into the mind of one of the ‘Fathers of Science Fiction’ a worthwhile endeavor.” —Times News Online
    Show book