Fiction. Beset with environmental disaster, animal-like children, and the failure of traditional roles, the twenty-six fathers of CATACLYSM BABY raise their desperate voices to reveal the strange stations of frustrated parenthood, to proclaim familial thrashings against the fading light of our exhausted planet, its glory grown wild again. As the known world disappears, these beleaguered and all-too-breakable men cling ever tighter to the duties of an unrecoverable past, even as their children rush ahead, evolve away. Unflinching in the face of apocalypse and unblinking before the complicated gaze of parental love, Matt Bell's CATACLYSM BABY is a powerful chronicle of our last days, and of the tentative graces that might fill the hours of our dusk.

Author City: ANN ARBOR, MI USA

Matt Bell is the author of How They Were Found (Keyhole Press, 2010), a collection of fiction, and CATACLYSM BABY (Mud Luscious Press, 2012), a novella. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, Hayden's Ferry Review, Gulf Coast, and Willow Springs, and has been anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories and Best American Fantasy, as well as shortlisted for Best American Short Stories. He is the Senior Editor at Dzanc Books.

Reviews and Other Links
author site
C. L. Bledsoe @ Mourning Goats
audio: interview by Brad Listi @ Other People
Jena Salon @ BOMBlog