Three Ways of the Saw: Stories
by Matt Mullins
Fiction/Stories, Trade Paperback Original
ISBN 978-0-9832080-6-8
5.25 x 8 in / 216 pages
Publication Date: February 29, 2012
A Foreword 2012 IndieFab Award Finalist
Three Ways of the Saw offers a startling new voice in traditional storytelling that carves out a territory all its own. The vibrant prose of this debut collection—ranging in both style and length from experimental and realistic to flash and longer form fiction—searingly probes and dissects the idea of connection and alienation with one’s self, the world and others.
Always gritty, often cruel, yet quietly insightful, this jagged chain of vignettes is for readers who try to hold their thoughts together with duct tape while never quite grasping the things they just can’t seem to name.
With sharp attention to language and imagery, Matt Mullins wields a fine, cutting-edge use of story structure, unexpected plot turns, ratcheting tempo, and mad, swirling metaphors. The 25 stories are sliced into three sections:
1) BLACK SHEEP MISSIVES: The self-destructive actions of the only son of an Irish, Catholic family, a self-appointed outcast.
2) DISCHORDS: Ragged, ne’er do well characters out of tune with the whole mess of society.
3) GHOST LIMBS: Shadowy imprints of longing and things gone missing.
Prepare your senses for aches, echoes, and arrivals at the moment of departure. Welcome to a work of literature that doesn’t shy away from the human condition—it embodies it.
Praise for Three Ways of the Saw
“There’s a brooding, raw, rustbelt, jazzy, Motown energy that informs the sensibility and sound of this writer, fuels his prose, and gathers this collection into a compelling whole.” – Stuart Dybek, The Coast of Chicago
“This book is lit from within, the pages dunked in the holy water of booze and kerosene.” – Peter Markus, We Make Mud
“Three Ways of the Saw is a collection that delivers. One to the Gut. One to the Head. One to the Heart. This book knocked me out.”- Cathy Day, The Circus in Winter
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Matt Mullins is a writer, musician, experimental filmmaker and multimedia artist. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Mid American Review, Pleiades, Hunger Mountain, Harpur Palate, Descant, Hobart, and a number of other print and online literary journals. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Ball State University (BSU) where he is a faculty fellow with BSU’s Emerging Media Initiative. His recent works of interactive/digital literature can be found at lit-digital.com.