Content Tagged ‘novel’

Matthew Neill Null’s West Virginia Tour

Honey from the Lion tours the land from whence it came this week! If you’re in the great state of West Virginia, consider joining Matt at any of the following events. Full details are on his website.

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3 p.m., Sunday, January 17, 2016, HUNTINGTON, WV, Empire Books & News

6 p.m., Monday, January 18, 2016, CHARLESTON, WV, Kanawha County Public Library

noon, Tuesday, January 19, 2016, WHEELING, WV, Lunch with Books, Ohio County Public Library

6 p.m., Tuesday, January 19, 2016, MORGANTOWN, WV, Black Bear Reading Series

The Masters Review Leaves Us Speechless

The Masters Review posted its review of Honey from the Lion, and completely wowed us! Here are a few of our favorite sentences from Brett Beach’s fantastic response to the book.

“The novel moves with the assured pace of a thriller, while sentence by sentence Null plays with the language of place, of longing, and of violence.”

“At a time when California’s coast has been given a death sentence, ice caps are melting, and warnings about the sustainability of man’s consumption are still dismissed by some politicians and citizens, Null’s evocation of the forest’s steady destruction is both a prescient fable of our future and a humbling reminder of man’s consistent and tyrannical history of ruin at any cost.”

“Frankly no first novel has the right to be this good—and yet, Null succeeds.”

Thanks so much to Brett and to the Masters Review!

Smith Henderson interviews Matthew Neill Null for Tin House blog

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Smith Henderson and Matthew Neill Null are having a great time over on the Tin House blog, the Open Bar, today. They discuss everything from writerly self-suspicions to tobacco-worker unions, what fiction can do to sheep jokes. “First-rate fiction,” Matt says, “is always about third-rate people.” To which Smith replies, “Hot damn.”

See the whole interview here, and thanks so much to Smith and Tin House for the great conversation!

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Publication Day!

Today Lookout Books releases its debut novel, Honey from the Lion by Matthew Neill Null. We could not be more excited to bring this book to an audience of readers. Lyrical, suspenseful, tender, gritty, this book tells the story of a group of timber wolves at the turn of the century in the West Virginia Alleghenies who, complicit in profound environmental devastation, attempt to wrest control of their own fate.

Matt is a writer to pay attention to (his book of short stories is forthcoming from Sarabande too), and here—in his own words—is the story behind this unforgettable book.

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Honey from the Lion reclaims a vanished past—a history of daily toil and desire. It is a book of dreams, of the drifter and the clerk, of the washerwoman and the panther. I wanted to write America’s shadow story—the characters popular history crops from the frame. My home state of West Virginia has produced no great men, in the old sense of that phrase, no presidents, but hundreds of thousands have lived and died there, a rich human pageant. This novel is my bid to give them back their stories.

My dad had a good buddy on Fenwick Mountain named Brown. He was a mine foreman from Richwood, one of the boomtowns on which the novel’s Helena is based, in Nicholas County, where I was born. One summer day when I was eight or nine years old, Brown took us to visit a friend of his, an ex–coal miner. The friend was hunched over and shuffled as he walked—he lived off a disability check. After a long round of talk, he led us to what he called his museum, a cramped room in the attic of his farmhouse. Tables overflowed with shellacked hornets’ nests, shed antlers, obsolete hand tools, arrowheads and pestles, the skulls of bobcats, and stone-hard clutches of burrs from the American chestnut, gone a hundred years. But most impressive to me: on the backside of his mountain, the remains from a logging camp. He had picked his way down there and raked the earth to find what was left. He placed a spent pineknot in my palm, no bigger than a hand grenade, and explained how the loggers lit their way of a night, using the pitch as a torch. He had found their bottle dump and its wonders, like the three-sided blue bottles that once contained arsenic, bringing up visions of poisonings, of jealousies and fist fights in high mountain camps, far from the law. Last he led us to the garage, where he kept antiquated logging tools: drag chains, harnesses, the crosscut saw the loggers called the misery whip. After we’d waved good-bye to his friend, Brown spoke of the man’s loneliness. I looked back through the window of the truck, where I sat on the bench seat between Brown and my dad. He had gone back inside. Like that man, the keeper of those things, a novelist desires objects, textures, physicality. A novelist reconstructs vanished lives.

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At Length features Honey from the Lion excerpt

An excerpt from Honey from the Lion is up over at the fantastic At Length, a venue for work that is “open to possibilities shorter forms preclude.”

After reading the excerpt, spend some time with their other features. We’re especially fond of this quiz series, which asks writers and artists to answer questions pulled from contemporary poems. They ask What is more distracting than clouds? and they get answers.