Matthew Stadler is the author of five novels, Chloe Jarren's La Cucaracha (2011), Allan Stein (1999),The Sex Offender (1994), The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee (1993), and Landscape: Memory (1990), and several books of non-fiction. He is the recipient of Guggenheim, Ingram-Merrill , and United States Artists fellowships. He was the literary editor of Nest magazine and co-founder of Clear Cut Press and of Publication Studio. He lives in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
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The Sex OffenderA Novel
“Do you masturbate?” he pried.
“Only alone, by myself.” I felt him bristle at my insolence.
“Do you work with appropriate fantasies?”
“Work?”
“You know, do you masturbate to appropriate fantasies before indulging in your inappropriate ones?” He’d given me very specific instructions about this. He scolded my silence by scooting his chair forward till I could smell the odor of his leg.
“Sometimes. Sometimes I forget.”
THE SEX OFFENDER © 1994 by Matthew Stadler; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.
The Sex Offender :A Novel -
The Sex OffenderA Novel
No stars pierced the sky, nor lights reflected back off the overcast. A fire burned high on the bare hillside. Its orange flame danced weakly in the frozen air, offering the occasional blackened silhouette of branches and a tiny, fluttering tricolor being carried around the flames. Was Hakan up there, I wondered, with them? Would her song be sung, again, wobbling richly through the winter air to touch my ears, and why? What standard did she bear for them, what spirit? Was the night their enemy or friend? I watched the Prime Minister wander away into that same night and could not help but love him whose demise they sought; I felt, for the first time, that they loved him too. They could not say it, and perhaps did not even recognize the embrace contained within their hatred. I wondered how much he knew of their plot against him, and whether it was an end he in some ways desired. And what did he know of me?
THE SEX OFFENDER © 1994 by Matthew Stadler; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.
The Sex Offender :A Novel -
Landscape: MemoryA Novel21 June 1915, BolinasI took my drawing kit with me south along the shore, watching Duncan running off ahead, disappearing around a bend, off to Stinson Beach or Half Moon Bay or Mexico or however far his legs could carry him in two hours. I walked as far as Weeks Gulch and turned to look at the actual setting of the memory I'd been trying to paint, afraid of what I might see. There were, it appeared, some problems. The painting I'd made was markedly different from what lay before me. The beautiful hills I'd drawn were much higher and their descent to the water much sharper than what was there now. The lagoon itself—that is, the lagoon in front of me—spread out farther and into more mysterious nooks than I could find in the lagoon I had drawn. The position of the sun was impossible.All in all I found my painting a good sight more satisfying than the actual landscape. I had several choices and I faced them boldly. I chose to make excuses and go with my aesthetic impulse. My impulse was to leave my work as it was and forge ahead. My excuse was that my memory was more like a nurse log than a camera. I was remembering the trouble I'd had with Cicero. If he was right, if my memory ought to be an accurate replica of the original experience, if that was so, my painting was hopelessly inaccurate. It was a bad painting of a fuzzy memory. But I preferred to think that memory is never frozen, nor should it be. My painting was a successful rendering of the dynamic memory that had simply begun with the original event. It accurately captured the decaying grotesque of memory that lay rotting in my head, that fallen nurselog out of which so much of value must be growing. My painting, I figured, was so very accurate in its depiction of this memory that it would inevitably look wrong when compared to the original model.
Landscape: Memory :A Novel
“Equal parts Kafka, Burgess, and Brazil, Matthew Stadler's novel is beautifully morbid. The eloquent, florid prose in which Mr. Uh Uh describes his passions gives him an overwrought nobility . . . Stadler's narrative weaves in and out of humor, grandiosity, fantasy, and sentiment with rare grace and cleverness.” —The Village Voice [on The Sex Offender]
“What makes Allan Stein unusual is the lyric suppleness and restraint of the writing . . . refined but deceptively offhand . . . The book may bear the faint marks of . . . fussy experimentalism, but it is powered by passion.” —Edmund White, The New York Times Book Review
“Matthew Stadler has perfect pitch. Allan Stein sings with the same lucid prose that graced his previous works . . . Stadler's clear writing carries a story about one of our grittier taboos; adult male sexual desire for teenage boys. The book succeeds in its exploration of such controversial content in large part because of Stadler's elegant writing and unrelenting candor.” —Judy Doenges, The Seattle Times
“The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee renders Matthew Stadler the best gay writer of our time.” —Robert Drake, The Gay Cannon
Selected Works
