Matthew Stadler Selected Works

This darkly comic novel chronicles the life of Nicholas Dee, an earnest young historian whose crippling fear of loss has become his undoing. Lulled to sleep at night by the city's constant clatter of police choppers, Nicholas parlays his fear of losing everything into a promising idea for an academic grant: He will write a "History of Insurance." In this glittering, unidentified city of high culture and hideous crime, Nicholas can find no safe haven for the orderly life he desires. At night he is haunted by memories of his dead father; by day the devilish machinations of the university and the police ensnare him. His book, already evolving from a history of insurance into a compelling narrative tale (chronicling the creation of an opera house in seventeenth-century Holland), becomes his only refuge.

This extravagantly imagined tale chronicles the rehabilitation of a teacher who has had a love affair with a twelve-year-old boy. While the man's crime was to mistake molestation for love, his cure will partake of the same confusion: to help and rehabilitate him, the police and the doctors subject the teacher to increasingly bizarre forms of therapy. Called "an astonishment" by Dennis Cooper, The Sex Offender weds compelling mystery with comedy, satire, and politics.

Comic, erotic, and richly imagined, Allan Stein follows the journey of a compromised young teacher to Paris to uncover the sad history of Gertrude Stein's troubled nephew Allan. Having been fired from his job because of a sex scandal involving a student, the teacher travels to Paris under an assumed name—that of his best friend, Herbert. In Paris, "Herbert" becomes enchanted by Stephane, a fifteen-year-old boy. As he unravels the gilded but sad childhood of Allan Stein, "Herbert" is haunted by memories of his own boyhood, particularly his odd, flamboyant mother. Moving from the late twentieth century back to the 1900s, effortlessly blending fact and fiction, Allan Stein is a charged exploration of eroticism, obsession, and identity.

A murder mystery set in the storied mountain city of Guanajuato, Mexico, by the author of Allan Stein and Landscape: Memory. When a wealthy and respected woman of the people is found dead on a remote mountain hillside, an unlikely young photographer is thrust into the cross-hairs of American money and Mexican politics. Moving swiftly from lavish dinners to seedy bars, Chloe Jarren's La Cucaracha brings the genre formalism and precision of a John Le Carré novel to bear on "the mongrel dynamism, the deluded optimism of 21st century neo-liberal politics." It can be read for free online here.

In the small Dutch city of Deventer, a pair of projects recently emerged that unite individual art practice and urban planning: the development of a disused mid-twentieth-century hospital complex; and the transformation of a Catholic hospital monastery into the Jozef Health Centre Deventer. Deventer tells the story of these two projects.

This stunningly crafted novel takes place in the years of a boy's passage to manhood in the shimmering, vibrant San Francisco of 1914. The son of a suffragette mother and eccentric ornithologist father, Maxwell Field Kosegarten keeps a poignant record of discovery and loss in the diary his mother gives him for his sixteenth birthday. Even as he and his half-Persian friend, Duncan, explore the ruins left behind by the 1906 earthquake, the gala World's Fair, and the erotic, soul-shaking feelings of first love, the romantic glow of this interlude between boyhood and maturity is tarnished first by accounts of the carnage in France and then by the swift, tragic ending of Max and Duncan's love affair. As memory and reality entwine, as ideas mutate through introspection, and as feelings sturggle for life on paper, Landscape: Memory becomes a lyrical, beautifully written narrative—an impressive debut for a gifted young writer.

Today, the photo album is something we practically take for granted, and "scrapbooking" is a billion dollar industry with its own television network. It was not always so. Before the camera, ordinary families had little more than the family Bible, a portrait of grandpa, and a drawer full of documents. Then Eastman Kodak introduced the Brownie, giving Americans the means to document and record their daily lives. Hundreds of thousands of these cameras were produced, and as a result small collections of photographs were assembled and preserved in an astonishing assortment of albums, with photographs as the raw material for collages, constructions, and text experiments.

Snapshot Chronicles is a visual exploration of the creative outpouring made possible by the camera. Friends, family, travel, domestic life, special occasions, the workplace, farm and city life—these were all intermingled in early albums in surprising and dynamic forms. Men, women, and even children became the creators of their own visual biographies, and documenters of previously unprecedented aspects of American life. Four essayists, including Matthew Stadler, weave together the history of the photo album, making them not just a part of our past but a significant aspect of Americana. Snapshot Chronicles is designed by noted graphic designer Martin Venezky (It Is Beautiful...Then Gone).

The Back Room is an occasional series of presentations/symposia/bacchanals in Portland, Oregon, replete with food, drink, music, and general boisterousness garlanding the central pleasure of bright intellects voicing their excellent texts, winging it in conversation, and screening or presenting various textual and visual delights. Including work by Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Moira Roth, Lisa Robertson, and many more. This collection is meant to inspire and inform copycat efforts in other cities. Edited by Matthew Stadler.