Matthew Salesses, Our Island of Epidemics, PANK, 2010."Fourteen tiny tales recount the story of a community of island dwellers who catch their island’s strange and fleeting epidemics—epidemics like memory loss, unrequited love, magic, extrasensitive hearing, talking to animals, and dissociation—and the relationship that the people of the island have with their home, with each other, and with the diseases. That is, until one man becomes immune.
Told in the collective first-person, Our Island of Epidemics examines the nature of tale-telling when the audience for the tale includes the tellers themselves."
"Extended sickness, packed-in sexspace, a she-god named Sam, stone sandwiches, ganglions, weight gain, dookers, spells of fainting: this book about making a book is full of hell, though a giddy kind of hell you might like to read aloud to someone loving, to share its magic logic, its dragonfruit, its rare disease." —Blake Butler
"I loved this book. Matthew Salesses creates a new world and pours his entire imagination into it. There’s so much magic. I felt it on my fingertips while reading. I’ll say it again – I loved this book." —Shane Jones
"On Matt Salesses’ strange and infectious Island, dragonfruit have wings and the aftertaste of fire, illness is freedom, dreams are shared, and interventions are staged to stop citizens’ obsessing. You may fall in love with these small stories of free will and fate, but they might not requite you. And while their epidemic of short term memory loss might make it impossible for them to remember you, you will recall them: magical and complex." —Kathleen Rooney
"One of the great feats of fiction is to create a world where anything can happen. Matthew Salesses has done this with Our Island of Epidemics and, in doing so, he has revealed the great difficulty of the human condition.” —Michael Kimball
"Unrequited love, dissociation, unstoppably growing hearts, extrasensitive hearing—these are just a few of the epidemics that strike the island at the center of Matthew Salesses’ dazzling collection. The voice of the island’s inhabitants is hypnotic, and Salesses’ exploration of the epidemics and their effect, of the ways we construct history and identity, are surprising and smart and richly, devastatingly human. With Our Island of Epidemics, Salesses has established himself as a brilliant new force in contemporary fiction. I loved this book, and I would gladly follow the author anywhere." —Laura van den Berg
“In Our Island of Epidemics, Matthew Salesses conjures from the sea a nation populated by a people struck together by one universal affliction after another. This is a citizenry more unified than that of our own land, but also one whose members have nowhere to turn for aid from their various ailments, their short-term memory loss, their unrequited loves, their fits of magic and insomnia and shared dreams. It is only from within their ranks that they might find the means to prevail through a series of charming interventions and endless sincerity, and through the telling of their story, this one one you hold now in your hands, the fantastic tale of those longest and strangest years yet seen upon their island.” —Matt Bell
"Despite the plague of frustration and hardship that is Matthew Salesses’ Island of Epidemics, it’s a place I’d like to visit, just to live the language and ingenuity of its creator. Salesses is a crack shot in pinpointing how we all cope, nailing this microcosm of humanity within these little stories. They are all fantastic and hilarious and beautiful, well beyond their length, well beyond any island." —Michael G Czyzniejewski
"Months ago, I came across one of Matthew Salesses’s Our Island of Epidemics shorts in Wigleaf and was immediately impressed by its inventive, quirky spirit. At the time I thought it was a one-off piece, but within a few weeks another short appeared in a different journal. And then another. To this reviewer, it seemed like we were settling into an epidemic of Our Island of Epidemics. Online, the individual shorts still had that blissfully random feeling. To add to their fun, many (though not all) hypertextually linked back to each other—you could start reading "The King of Unrequited Love" in Pindeldyboz and click a link that would connect you to, say, Necessary Fiction, where you could read two other Epidemics pieces, each of which might send you elsewhere.
I gathered that Salesses was working toward some greater project with these pieces, but I was not quite prepared for the effect of seeing all thirteen original shorts collected together (along with a final story) in one chapbook. Perhaps I was a poor reader when I originally encountered them, or perhaps the random sequence in which I had stumbled upon them led me to think of them as confections, but when read together in a single sitting as the chapbook now orders them, Salesses’s work takes on—dare I say?—gravitas.
The inhabitants of Salesses’s island succumb to random epidemics—hunger, memory loss, extra-sensitive hearing—that fade as each new epidemic infects the island. "The epidemics were not exactly illnesses," Salesses writes. Instead, quirky fates of the most beguiling sort befall on the island. "The epidemics are relentless, one epidemic fading into another like seasons."
Despite being born in the post-millennial digital age, these stories could easily have sprung from the oral tradition of ancient Greece. One thinks of Odysseus stopping at strange islands on his voyage home from the Trojan War. But instead of the many islands of Homer’s Odyssey, the action in Salesses’s chapbook is confined to one island.
The epidemics can be heartbreaking (viz. "The Epidemic of Unrequited Love" and "The Epidemic of Lost Children") or downright bizarre—during one, a character "carved a statue of her animal god… Later, during the epidemic of magic, the animal came alive. It jumped around, destroying her apartment... it was a squirrel-like god with a tiny tail that never stopped wagging… it screamed, ‘Justice, justice.’ And soon it began to hunt down people and stomp them to death."
Salesses’s fantastical bent is as strong as anything you’d find in ancient mythology. Animal husbandry practices include the raising of dragonfruit, winged creatures that "spit fire from their flower-beaks and wagged their stems to propel themselves, dropping scales like tiny shooting stars." Though Salesses references ancient mythology and, at times, fairy tales, it is hard for this reviewer not to read into them a sly commentary on the notion of community and our contemporary situation: "Our island grew overcrowded. You can imagine the xenophobia that struck us always anew."
During the Epidemic of Hunger, no amount of food can satiate the islanders’ appetites. They drain their bank accounts and borrow huge sums from foreign lenders, importing (among other things) "cod tongues and dookers," in a futile attempt to satisfy their cravings: "We gained weight, and cramped from overeating, and feared our organs would explode inside us. We hobbled around our island, our bodies pumpkin carriages waiting for midnight."
The islanders recognize the absurdity of their plight. They wallow helplessly, bouncing from one bizarre epidemic to the next, yet their shared condition brings them, if not solace, a sense of community. The island itself is rumored to have been populated during an epidemic of "sexual cannibalism." Eventually, as much as the islanders despise their torments, the epidemics become integral to their identity. The epidemics are "addictive." It’s like they’re on some crazy carnival ride, flitting through an endless stream of afflictions: "We were grateful for the epidemics. This was more about us than about the epidemics, but for a long time we thought it was out of our control. Our gratefulness, and everything else."
When one man turns out to be immune to the epidemics, the infected islanders view him with suspicion:
We feared what else he was immune to… We took stock of him curiously—he was normal, so he was strange.
"But I’m healthy," he kept saying, the bastard.
We ran him into the hills. He threatened immunity on us.
Think of the contemporary American 24-hour news cycle, clogged with "trending" stories of an absolutely trivial nature. On Salesses’s island, instead of fretting over the latest Britney or Paris hijinks or the alarmingly frank text messages sent by NFL quarterbacks, the islanders are consumed by their own navel gazing. Over-politeness. Delirious joy. Cultural elitism. These and other silly epidemics dominate their attention. They hold interventions, with varying degrees of success, and compulsively chronicle the epidemics, recording not only those they have experienced but, in true myth-making fashion, "the epidemics that were rumored to have happened before that."
Mythology is not a static art. Homer’s audience would have heard endless variations of his tales told around camp fires and at communal bacchanals. Salesses’s final chapter begins with a riff on one of the most devastating consequences of European settlement in the Americas. Normalcy, of a sort, is restored to the island, yet the islanders remain enthralled by the epidemics. They continue to read and write about them, fascinated by this subject that they can’t quite flush out of their systems. Luckily for us, Salesses can not quite flush this material out of his system either: he is reportedly preparing a hypertext edition— allowing readers more permutations of The Island of Epidemics. Like the events within his chapbook, his "telling is relentless, too." - Nick Kocz
The stories in this collection have previously appeared in several fine magazines:
“That Was When They Remembered Our Sweet Oblivion” Cavalier Literary Couture. April 2010.
“The King of Unrequited Love.”Pindeldyboz. June 2010.
“Writing about Our Island of Epidemics.”PANK. August 2010.
“Our Island of Epidemics.” Word Riot. May 2010.
“Our Organs Would Explode Inside Us.” PANK. August 2010.
“No Self Felt Hurt by the Shadow Acts.” Wigleaf. April 2010
“The Man in the Hills.” Necessary Fiction. May 2010.
“On Telling This Story.” Necessary Fiction. May 2010.
“An Intervention.”Corium Magazine. Issue 2.
“The History of Our Island of Epidemics.” Thieves Jargon. Issue 199.
“Come Back, You’ve Disafeared.” Kitty Snacks. September 2010.
“Stop Thinking You Own the Forest.” Hobart. July 2010.
“At the Intervention to Stop the Epidemic of Obesssing.” Everyday Genius. June 18, 2010
The final story is “The End of the Epidemics” can be found in the book.
Short Fiction
“The Mercy Hospital Vampire.” Quarterly West. Forthcoming.
20 from I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying. The Lifted Brow. Forthcoming, No. 10, June 2011.
Three from I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying. The Literarian. Forthcoming.
Three from I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying. nthWORD. Forthcoming.
“What’s the Opposite of Succubus?” Blip Magazine. April 2011.
“A Happy Story.” Thunderclap Magazine. Issue 5.
“Literary Rejections Applied.” Thunderclap Magazine. Issue 5.
“Slowed Time, Normal Time.” Kartika Review. Issue 8.
“Bernhardt or Yeti.” Night Train Magazine. December 2010.
“Lovers.” Bluestem Magazine. Winter 2010/11.
“How to Be a Literary Figure.” Johnny America. Issue 8.
“In My War Novel.” HTMLGIANT. (Finalist, So Many Books Contest; Runner-up, The University of New Orleans Study Abroad Programs Writing Contest.)
“The Grief Ministry.”Glimmer Train. Issue 76. (Third Prize, Family Matters Contest.
“The Grotesque.” Torpedo. Issue 7.
“The Night I Met Her She Said Once You Go Yellow.” JMWW. Spring 2010.
“How to Plant a Puppy.” Witness. Vol. XXIII.
“The Fathers.” Going Down Swinging. No. 29.
“The Last Seal Pup.” The Literary Review. Vol. 53, No. 1. Read.
“Marriage Seasons.” Picture Postcard Press.
“Cirque de Recession.” Twelve Stories. Issue 2. (Anthologized in On the Clock, Bottom Dog Press, 2010.)
“If This Reaches You.” Etchings. Vol. 7.
“Mongolia, New York, Prague, Krakow.” The Collagist. Issue 1.
“Fraser Island.” Press 1. Vol. 3, No. 2. (Anthologized in The Red Room: Writings from Press 1, 2010.)
“Robot Goes to Work.” Storyglossia. Issue 33. (Anthologized in On the Clock, Bottom Dog Press, 2010.)
“The Lady of the Reef.” Hot Metal Bridge. Spring 2009.
“Corporal Dickenson is in Jail.” Pleiades. Vol. 29, No. 1.
“A Wikipedia Entry: Trichotillomania.” Lamination Colony. Spring 2009.
“Physiological Drought.” Prick of the Spindle. Vol 3, No. 1. (Anthologized in The Way We Sleep, Left Field Press, forthcoming 2012.)
“Curve.” elimae. 2009:03.
“Donuts.” elimae. 2009:03.
“Cannibals on a Yacht.” Flatmancrooked. March 2009. (Anthologized in Anthology of Great New Writing Done During An Economic Depression, 2009.)
“How to Be a Cannibal.” Flatmancrooked. March 2009. (Anthologized inAnthology of Great New Writing Done During An Economic Depression, 2009.)
“Nicky Boy and Baby Girl Are Illustrated.” American Short Fiction. March 2009.
“Six Ways I Want to Die.” Six Sentences. February 2009.
“Sorry for Breaking in.” Boston Literary Magazine.Winter 2008.
“To Choke Up Like That.” Pank. Vol. 3, No. 3.
“The Swap.” Lost Magazine. Issue 26.
“Stone.” Front Porch. Issue 7.
“Dances with Dogs.” Quick Fiction. Issue 13.
“Dangling Modifiers in Honor of Christmas.” Monkeybicycle. December 2007
“How to Be a Conquerer.” Mid-American Review. Vol: XXVIII, No. 1. (First Prize, 2007 Fineline Contest.) Read.
“Captain Cook Discovers Australia.” Hobart. August 2006
The Good Men Project
Matthew's contributions to The Good Men Project Magazine:
The Sensitive Dude’s Guide to Sports
Boise, Cathreen, and a Circuit Board of Dreams
For Husbands to Please Their Wives
The World Is as Insane as Ever
Five Trips to the Bunghole and I am the Shit
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