Skip to main content

Brendan Mathews

Biography

Brendan Mathews

Brendan Mathews is the author of THE WORLD OF TOMORROW, which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and named an Indie Next Great Read and an Editors' Choice by the New York Times Book Review. His latest book is his debut story collection, THIS IS NOT A LOVE SONG.

A Fulbright Scholar to Ireland, his fiction has twice appeared in The Best American Short Stories and in Glimmer Train, Virginia Quarterly Review, Salon, Cincinnati Review, and other publications in the US and UK. He has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Sustainable Arts Foundation, and the Sewanee Writers Conference.

Born and raised in upstate New York, he graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and received his MFA from the University of Virginia. He lives with his wife and their four children in Lenox, Massachusetts, and teaches at Bard College at Simon’s Rock.

Brendan Mathews

Books by Brendan Mathews

This Is Not a Love Song: Stories
by Brendan Mathews - Fiction, Short Stories

When marriages, friendships and families come undone, to what lengths do we go to keep it all together? That question lies at the heart of Brendan Mathews' debut story collection. A young mother watches as her desperate husband, convinced that a hidden poison lurks inside their walls, tears their home apart. Two journalists bruised by romance and revolution, one a survivor of the Bosnian war, trade tales of lost lovers. A father and his sons haggle over the family business during a high-stakes round of golf. And a lovesick circus clown tries to explain the accidents that bound him to a trapeze artist and a witless lion tamer.

The World of Tomorrow
by Brendan Mathews - Fiction, Historical Fiction

June 1939. Francis Dempsey and his shell-shocked brother Michael are on an ocean liner from Ireland bound for their brother Martin's home in New York City, having stolen a small fortune from the IRA. During the week that follows, the lives of these three brothers collide spectacularly with big-band jazz musicians, a talented but fragile heiress, a Jewish street photographer facing a return to Nazi-occupied Prague, a vengeful mob boss, and the ghosts of their own family's revolutionary past. When Tom Cronin, an erstwhile assassin forced into one last job, tracks the brothers down, their lives begin to fracture.