Matt Bell Books in Order

Matt Bell was born in Saginaw, Michigan, and grew up in the small town of Hemlock. He earned a BA in English from Oakland University, then an MFA in fiction from Bowling Green State University.

Before the novels reached a broad readership, Bell built a life around short fiction, editing, and the patient work of literary community. He founded the online magazine The Collagist and became a senior editor at Dzanc Books, while placing stories in magazines and anthologies. That early work shows the range he has kept throughout his career. His stories can start from familiar things, a family, a damaged city, a fairy tale, then lean into an unsettling question: what happens when the rules change?

His first full story collection, How They Were Found, arrived in 2010. Its thirteen pieces move among strange machines, disappearing people, fractured legends, and places where danger feels close but is never simple. Two years later, Cataclysm Baby turned parenthood into a set of linked apocalyptic fables. The book’s fathers are trying to care for children in an exhausted, unstable world, giving Bell a way to write about fear, responsibility, grief, and the hard work of letting go.

His fiction often gets weird before it gets easy.

That approach carried into his first novel, In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods. A newly married couple build a life beside a remote lake, only to find their hopes for family and safety tangled up with loss, jealousy, and a landscape that seems to answer back. The novel became a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award.

Scrapper, set in a ruined and overgrown Detroit, follows a scrap-metal scavenger whose attempt to help a kidnapped boy forces him to face the past he has buried. With Appleseed, Bell widened the frame again, connecting frontier Ohio, a climate-ravaged future, and a distant ice age through apples, corporate power, and the consequences of remaking the natural world. Appleseed was named a New York Times Notable Book.

Bell also writes about process. In Refuse to Be Done, he offers writers a workable way through a novel’s first draft, major rewrite, and final revision, with an emphasis on concrete tasks instead of waiting around for inspiration. His Baldur's Gate II is a personal work of nonfiction about the classic role-playing game, bringing together game choices, fantasy, and his own life as a reader and writer.

He doesn't treat genres as separate rooms.

Across his work, the recurring concerns are intimate: people trying to make homes, protect children, repair harm, and live with what they have done. The stories may contain monsters, transformations, or far-future ice, but the pressure usually comes from a relationship that has gone wrong or a promise that cannot be kept.

Bell teaches creative writing at Arizona State University, where he directs the Worldbuilding Initiative. He continues to move between teaching, nonfiction, speculative fiction, and stories that test how much a made-up world can reveal about ordinary human fears.