Bloomland

"Cycling between these characters observed and addressed, Bloomland juxtaposes the proximate with the predator, intermingling their perspectives until the flickering becomes a bloody tapestry of our beleaguered nation." —Washington Post "Englehardt’s brilliant and insanely brave debut is a culturally diagnostic achievement in the same way that Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Libra are culturally diagnostic achievements; his sentences are brutal and unflinching and yet mystically humane in the spirit of Denis Johnson’s Angels; and his America is at once beautiful and love-swirled and a kaleidoscopic wreck—a land whose cultural geology mirrors its physical one, routinely generating the “mindless malignancy” of town-wrecking tornadoes and desperate young men with guns." —Kirkus starred review "John Englehardt’s Bloomland is the sobering novel America needs right now...a sobering insight to the aftermath of a tragedy written in a unique perspective." —Debutiful "Potent...Englehardt’s debut poses timely, difficult questions." —Publishers Weekly "Set in Arkansas, Bloomland feels through and through like a novel in the southern tradition. Its cadence, its understanding of human nature—by which I mean it has a keen eye for how we behave both alone and in groups—and its complicated relationship with poverty and religion all resonate like a book by a southern author." —Seattle Review of Books "Bloomland is a perfect mix of realism and fabulism, of confrontation and remoteness." —Santa Fe Writers Project "A powerful, ambitious novel that bravely takes on one of the most perplexing, terrifying, and uniquely American phenomena: the school shooting. ... One can only hope future readers will pick up Englehardt’s novel to understand an idiosyncratic period of our history when we abjured our safety and the lives of our children." —Heavy Feather Review "Gorgeously written, intrepid by design, and deeply disconcerting in its authenticity, Bloomland is a remarkable achievement and stands out as an incredibly important novel of our time." —Arkansas International "Considering that we’re bombarded daily with footage from ground zero of one act of mass violence after another, I ask, 'Do we need a novel about it?' After finishing the last page of John Englehardt’s stark, yet heartbreakingly human novel, Bloomland, the answer is a confident, 'Yes, we do.'" —The Florida Review "A quiet, deeply moving book about trauma and its aftereffects. The characters—an aimless kid who opens fire in a university library, the instructor he murders, her husband, and the talented girlfriend of one of the victims—are all survivors of previous tragedies. Their stories are narrated by a young English professor who was involved with each of them, and his voice, disembodied, probing, sad, and oddly complicitous, gives the book an eerie, haunting strength. I read Bloomland in one sitting and have been thinking about it ever since." —Molly Giles, author of All the Wrong Places "Gripping, compelling, at once troubling and funny and deeply moving, Bloomland disturbs in all the right ways. John Englehardt has his finger on the pulse of America: our primitiveness and sophistication, our faith-hunger and empty yearning, our compulsion toward violence as the redemptive act, our relentless, romantic dance with death. With humor and insight and gorgeous prose, Englehardt traces the multiple faces of mass violence, giving us a stark and true and telling portrait of a place and a people in the heart of the country. This is a stunning debut." —Rilla Askew, author of Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place "Bloomland, as its title suggests, is a garden of dark delights. Wise to the point of faint aphorism, but never glib, Englehardt guides us with a sure hand through the intimate terrain of collective horrors—acts of God and acts of man, not so different as one might think. I surfaced at the end as if from a deep immersion, feeling as though I'd been carried very far away—not drowned, buoyed—to a place that, seen so sharply, looked, frighteningly and reassuringly, like home." —Padma Viswanathan, author of The Ever After of Ashwin Rao "This book is crammed full of sentences so brutal and good you want to copy down and remember them. It’s got insights into sadness and desperation but also into the longing to be something else that sometimes saves us. It’s amazing." —Rebecca Brown, author of Not Heaven, Somewhere Else "In beautifully wrought prose, John Englehardt paints a searing portrait of violence and its aftermath, a haunting reckoning with death that shimmers and pulses with life." —Emily Geminder, author of Dead Girls and Other Stories "Englehardt’s unflinching look at gun violence points to the many forms of social and cultural dysfunction that condition mass shootings and our inadequate responses to them. By presenting multiple perspectives, Englehardt boldly encourages readers to recognize the humanity of both victims and perpetrators. Bloomland ultimately offers a profound meditation on individual and collective grief and an arresting portrait of a society that refuses to countenance the complex causes and devastating human toll of gun violence." —Alice Hatcher, author of The Wonder That Was Ours "Openhearted yet cold-eyed, alive with carnage and deep caring, Bloomland treats its central tragedy, a mass shooting, in a way that reveals its entire ragged, bleeding scope. John Englehardt couldn’t be more subtle, even playful, as he probes both before and after, both Ground Zero and the surrounding ruin. At the same time, he couldn’t raise a more resonant wail of warning, as the mourners multiply till we too feel separated from the horror by only a few frail degrees. A handful of brave novels have tried to count the toll taken by by such slaughters, but none match Bloomland for portraying the monster of mass violence as so irredeemably American." —John Domini, author of Movieola!