Matthew Salesses

Author of
To Grieve Is To Carry Another Time (Little Brown, forthcoming)
The Sense of Wonder (Little Brown, 2023)
Craft in the Real World (Catapult, 2021)
The Hundred-Year Flood (Little A, 2015)
Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear: A Novel (Little A, 2020)

Matthew Salesses is the author of eight books, including The Sense of Wonder, which comes out in January 2023 from Little, Brown. Most recent are the national bestseller Craft in the Real World (a Best Book of 2021 at NPR, Esquire, Library Journal, Independent Book Review, Chicago Tribune, Electric Literature, and others) and the PEN/Faulkner Finalist and Dublin Literary Award longlisted novel Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear. He also wrote The Hundred-Year Flood; I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying; Different Racisms: On Stereotypes, the Individual, and Asian American Masculinity; The Last Repatriate; and Our Island of Epidemics (out of print). Also forthcoming is a memoir-in-essays, To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time.

Matthew was adopted from Korea and has written about adoption and race for Best American Essays 2020, NPR Code Switch, The New York Times Motherlode, VICE.com, Salon, Longreads, Gay Magazine, and many other venues. His short fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, PEN/Guernica, and Witness, among others. He has received awards and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, [PANK], HTMLGIANT, IMPAC, Inprint, and elsewhere. In 2015 Buzzfeed named him one of 32 Essential Asian American Writers.

Matthew is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University. He earned a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston and an M.F.A. in Fiction from Emerson College. He serves on the editorial boards of Green Mountains Review and Machete (an imprint of The Ohio State University Press), and has held editorial positions at Pleiades, The Good Men Project, Gulf Coast, and Redivider. He has read and lectured widely at conferences and universities and on TV and radio, including PBS, NPR, Al Jazeera America, various MFA programs, and the Tin House, Kundiman, Writers @ Work, and Boldface writing conferences.

MatthewSalesses.com / Twitter / Instagram / Represented by Ayesha Pande

The Sense of Wonder (Little, Brown, 2023)
New Yorker Best Books of 2023
Mother Jones 29 Books We Couldn’t Stop Thinking About in 2023

From the author of PEN/Faulkner finalist Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear and Craft in the Real World comes a "a smart, very meta take" (Kirkus Reviews) on the ways Asian Americans navigate the thorny worlds of sports and entertainment when everything is stacked against them.

An Asian American basketball star walks into a gym. No one recognizes him, but everyone stares anyway. It is the start of a joke but what is the punchline? When Won Lee, the first Asian American in the NBA, stuns the world in a seven-game winning streak, the global media audience dubs it “The Wonder”—much to Won’s chagrin. Meanwhile, Won struggles to get attention from his coach, his peers, his fans, and most importantly, his hero, Powerball!, who also happens to be Won’s teammate and the captain. Covering it all is sportswriter Robert Sung, who writes about Won's stardom while grappling with his own missed hoops opportunities as well as his place as an Asian American in media. And to witness it all is Carrie Kang, a big studio producer, who juggles a newfound relationship with Won while attempting to bring K-drama to an industry not known to embrace anything new or different.

The Sense of Wonder follows Won and Carrie as they chronicle the human and professional tensions exacerbated by injustices and fight to be seen and heard on some of the world’s largest stages. An incredibly funny and heart-rending dive into race and our “collective imagination that lays bare our limitations before blasting joyfully past them” (Catherine Chung). This is the work of a gifted storyteller at the top of his game.

Praise

“Matthew Salesses’s new novel is so freaking good I can’t stand it. Blistering, confident, full of swagger and heart, it is also an exhilaratingly smart treatise on race and our collective imagination that lays bare our limitations before blasting joyfully past them. A must read!”—Catherine Chung, author of The Tenth Muse and Forgotten Country

“What a pleasure to read work that spits off the page, fiction that vibrates and twitches with life. The Sense of Wonder is exactly that kind of book, one that refuses to let you forget about it, a novel that wants you to remember its story long after the initial read is done. This is a wildly physical book, the beating heart of it smashed up against the ribcage of the binding, thumping hard, demanding attention. I have never read anything like it. Matthew Salesses is a genius and The Sense of Wonder is a genuine marvel.”
—Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth and Mostly Dead Things

“Sharp, funny, and searingly original, The Sense of Wonder is a tour de force from one of the most inventive writers working today.”
—Kirstin Chen, author of Counterfeit

Craft in the Real World (Catapult, 2021)

A groundbreaking resource for fiction writers, teachers, and students, this manifesto and practical guide challenges current models of craft and the writing workshop by showing how they fail marginalized writers, and how cultural expectations inform storytelling.

The traditional writing workshop was established with white male writers in mind; what we call craft is informed by their cultural values. In this bold and original examination of elements of writing–including plot, character, conflict, structure, and believability–and aspects of workshop–including the silenced writer and the imagined reader– Matthew Salesses asks questions to invigorate these familiar concepts. He upends Western notions of how a story must progress. How can we rethink craft, and the teaching of it, to better reach writers with diverse backgrounds? How can we invite diverse storytelling traditions into literary spaces? 

Drawing from examples including One Thousand and One Nights, Curious George, Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, and the Asian American classic No-No Boy, Salesses asks us to reimagine craft and the workshop. In the pages of exercises included here, teachers will find suggestions for building syllabi, grading, and introducing new methods to the classroom; students will find revision and editing guidance, as well as a new lens for reading their work. Salesses shows that we need to interrogate the lack of diversity at the core of published fiction: how we teach and write it. After all, as he reminds us, “When we write fiction, we write the world.”

Praise

“Salesses is clearly a generous instructor, willing to share ideas for syllabus design, grading techniques and writing exercises. He brings to this work many years of experience as a writer and professor, along with palpable frustration at what he has witnessed or endured in these roles . . . Craft in the Real World is a significant contribution to discussions of the art of fiction and a necessary challenge to received views about whose stories are told, how they are told and for whom they are intended.” —Laila Lalami, The New York Times Book Review

“Amazing. Challenging. A total reimagining of craft. A must read for every writer.” – Roxane Gay

“A real eye opener . . . It unpacks the seemingly ‘universal’ lessons we learn about what makes fiction good to reveal how whiteness and maleness have shaped those values.” —Kumari Devarajan, Code Switch, NPR

“In this firmament-shattering examination of how we teach creative writing, Salesses, a novelist and professor, builds a persuasive argument for tearing up the rulebook. Tracing the traditional writing workshop to its roots in white, male cultural values, Salesses challenges received wisdom about the benchmarks of ‘good’ fiction, arguing that we must reimagine how we write and how we teach. Only then will our canon and our classrooms be the inclusive, expansive spaces we want them to be.” —Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire

“A call for revolution . . . For those interested in teaching creative writing, particularly through an anti-racist lens, Salesses provides not only the what and the why but the how. His book is a compendium of essays, enumerated thoughts on craft, a glossary of redefined craft terms, a catalogue of alternative workshop models, sample syllabus language, writing and revision exercises, and other forms—the full generosity of an experienced teacher saying, ‘Here, you’re welcome to everything I have.'” —Keri Bertino, BOMB

“An analytic investigation into the racialized history of craft and the ways BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and other underrepresented voices are erased in creative writing workshops . . . An essential read to any writer or creative writing instructor, regardless of genre . . . Craft in the Real World feels like a literary microcosm for the current global state of affairs. There is the sensation that readers are at once learning and unlearning, doing and undoing . . . It encourages writers, readers, and teachers to get uncomfortable in order to create more inclusive realities.” —Candace Eros Diaz, CRAFT

Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear: A Novel (Little A, 2020)

Finalist for the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

Matt Kim is always tired. He keeps passing out. His cat is dead. His wife and daughter have left him. He's estranged from his adoptive family. People bump into him on the street as if he isn't there.

He is pretty sure he's disappearing. His girlfriend, Yumi, is less convinced. But then she runs into someone who looks exactly like her, and her doppelgänger turns out to have dated someone who looks exactly like Matt. Except the other Matt was superior in every way. He was clever, successful, generous, and beloved—until one day he suddenly and completely vanished without warning. How can Matt Kim protect his existence when a better version of him wasn't able to? Or is his worse life a reason for his survival?

Set in a troubling time in which a presidential candidate is endorsed by the KKK and white men in red hats stalk Harvard Square, Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear is a haunting and frighteningly funny novel about Asian American stereotypes, the desires that make us human, puns, and what happens to the self when you have to become someone else to be seen.

Praise

“A remarkable, entertaining, disturbing achievement.”
—Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer

“Like everything Matthew Salesses writes, this book grabbed me on page one and didn’t let go.”
—Nicole Chung, author of All You Can Ever Know

“A brilliant, existential detective story in which the mystery is the truth of oneself. Disturbing in the best way.”
—Mat Johnson, author of Pym

“Inventive and profound, mordantly hilarious and wildly moving. Matthew Salesses is one of my all-time favorite writers, and this is his most thrilling book to date.”
—Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel

“An absolute masterpiece from a stunningly singular voice.”
—Kirstin Chen, author of Bury What We Cannot Take

“This is a book of breathtaking depth and scope. A miraculous achievement.”
—Catherine Chung, author of The Tenth Muse

“Salesses’s tale on the nature of existence triumphs with literary trickery.”
—Publisher’s Weekly

“Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear tackles the construction of racial identity and related political maelstroms with ease, humor, and genuine grace.”
—Ploughshares

The Hundred-Year Flood (Little A, 2015)

In the shadow of a looming flood that comes every one hundred years, Tee tries to convince himself that living in a new place will mean a new identity and a chance to shed the parallels between him and his adopted father. This beautiful and dreamlike story follows Tee, a twenty-two-year-old Korean-American, as he escapes to Prague in the wake of his uncle’s suicide and the aftermath of 9/11. His life intertwines with Pavel, a painter famous for revolution; Katka, his equally alluring wife; and Pavel's partner—a giant of a man with an American name. As the flood slowly makes its way into the old city, Tee contemplates his own place in life as both mixed and adopted and as an American in a strange land full of heroes, myths, and ghosts. In the tradition of Native Speaker and The Family Fang, the Good Men Project’s Matthew Salesses weaves together the tangled threads of identity, love, growing up, and relationships in his stunning first novel, The Hundred-Year Flood