Matthew Stadler Selected Works

Comic, erotic, and richly imagined, Allan Stein follows the journey of a compromised young teacher to Paris to uncover the sad history of Gertrude Stein's troubled nephew Allan. Having been fired from his job because of a sex scandal involving a student, the teacher travels to Paris under an assumed name—that of his best friend, Herbert. In Paris, "Herbert" becomes enchanted by Stephane, a fifteen-year-old boy. As he unravels the gilded but sad childhood of Allan Stein, "Herbert" is haunted by memories of his own boyhood, particularly his odd, flamboyant mother. Moving from the late twentieth century back to the 1900s, effortlessly blending fact and fiction, Allan Stein is a charged exploration of eroticism, obsession, and identity.

A murder mystery set in the storied mountain city of Guanajuato, Mexico, by the author of Allan Stein and Landscape: Memory. When a wealthy and respected woman of the people is found dead on a remote mountain hillside, an unlikely young photographer is thrust into the cross-hairs of American money and Mexican politics. Moving swiftly from lavish dinners to seedy bars, Chloe Jarren's La Cucaracha brings the genre formalism and precision of a John Le Carré novel to bear on "the mongrel dynamism, the deluded optimism of 21st century neo-liberal politics." It can be read for free online here.

In the small Dutch city of Deventer, a pair of projects recently emerged that unite individual art practice and urban planning: the development of a disused mid-twentieth-century hospital complex; and the transformation of a Catholic hospital monastery into the Jozef Health Centre Deventer. Deventer tells the story of these two projects.

This stunningly crafted novel takes place in the years of a boy's passage to manhood in the shimmering, vibrant San Francisco of 1914. The son of a suffragette mother and eccentric ornithologist father, Maxwell Field Kosegarten keeps a poignant record of discovery and loss in the diary his mother gives him for his sixteenth birthday. Even as he and his half-Persian friend, Duncan, explore the ruins left behind by the 1906 earthquake, the gala World's Fair, and the erotic, soul-shaking feelings of first love, the romantic glow of this interlude between boyhood and maturity is tarnished first by accounts of the carnage in France and then by the swift, tragic ending of Max and Duncan's love affair. As memory and reality entwine, as ideas mutate through introspection, and as feelings sturggle for life on paper, Landscape: Memory becomes a lyrical, beautifully written narrative—an impressive debut for a gifted young writer.