Cataclysm Baby (The Mud Luscious Press Novel(La))
"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. Written with an ingenuity and joy that call to mind Italo Calvino'sInvisible Cities, each chapter is a treasure: Here are beast of burden children, larval girls, subterranean daughters and choirs of sirens, combustible baby boys. I loved this book and want to recommend it to every human parent and child I know; if trees, rocks, and stars were literate, I would recommend it to them, too. "Where do babies come from?" children ask their parents, andCataclysm Babyhas an alphabet of answers as beautiful and mysterious as that ancient question, while always posing its haunting corollary: 'Where do they go?' --Karen Russell, author ofSwamplandia!"You can read Matt Bell's apocalyptic abecedarium as a grotesque allegory of the devastations of parenthood, or as a grim realist extrapolation evoked by our crumbling world order. But these lovely, harrowing pieces do not float off into the Ideasphere; they remain tethered to the dusty, arid earth by their palpable nouns:  baby, hair, teeth, womb, seed, porridge, hut, crib, bone, mouth, hatchet, shovel, flesh. LikeThe Red Cavalry StoriesorThe Age of Wire and String,Cataclysm Babyis both surreal and vividly concrete, as much a Feeling Experiment as a Thought Experiment. The trope of end time is always about revelation, and what is revealed here, among other things, is Bell's brutal compassion." --Chris Bachelder, author ofAbbott Awaits"The baby born as fur ball, the one who chews up its sibling in the womb, the amputated limbs, the child sacrifices, the girl untethered into the sky, the skewed biblical cadences and the mythic tropes, the continuous horror begot by parenthood and authority--Matt Bell's collection of condensed narraticules,Cataclysm Baby, is Avant-Gothic at its most remarkable, unsettling, potent." --Lance Olsen, author ofCalendar of Regrets"Here is the alphabet of the pulsing apocalypse that is fatherhood, a book in love with what words, like parents, create: beauty, terror, awe." --Lucy Corin, author ofThe Entire Predicament