Sept nouvelles sur treize de ce recueil de Matthew Baker qui sera publié par Holt seront adaptées pour le cinéma ou la télévision! Voici la liste impressionnante des deals qui ont été finalisés :
THE TRANSITION – droits d’adaptation acquis par Amazon
LIFE SENTENCE – droits d’adaptation acquis par Netflix
THE APPEARANCE – droits d’adaptation acquis par Makeready
RITES – droits d’adaptation acquis par James Ponsoldt, directeur de “The Circle”
WHY VISIT AMERICA – droits d’adaptation acquis par FX
LOST SOULS – droits d’adaptation acquis par Fox Searchlight.
TO BE READ BACKWARD – droits d’adaptation acquis par Fox
For readers of George Sanders and Carmen Maria Machado and watchers of Black Mirror and The Twilight Zone, WHY VISIT AMERICA is for anyone who, like the citizens of Baker’s America, “don’t subscribe to any one brand of politics” but who want to simply be free
WHY VISIT AMERICA
Stories
by Matthew Baker
Holt, TBA
The citizens of Plainfield, TX, a tiny town that “couldn’t even be plotted onto your basic left-right binary,” have had it with the United States, “that broke-down country.” So they vote to secede, rename themselves America “in memory of our former country,” and happily set themselves up to receive tourists from their closest neighbor. America. Couldn’t happen? Well, it might, and so it goes in the thirteen stories in Matthew Baker’s brilliantly illuminating, incisive, and heartbreaking collection WHY VISIT AMERICA. A young man breaks the news to his family that he is going to transition – from an analog body to a digital existence. A young woman abducts a child – her own – from a government-run childcare facility. A man returns home after committing a great crime, his sentence being that his memory – his entire life – is wiped clean. Employing an exhilarating range of genres, Baker takes the issues confronting so many of us – from old age to runaway consumer culture, from immigration to infertility – and with truly innovative language and a very deep heart, makes us think about them in a new way.
Margaret Atwood recently commented that “[i]n science fiction, it’s always about now. What else could it be about? There is no future. There are many possibilities, but we do not know which one we are going to have.” WHY VISIT AMERICA is about these possibilities: an exegesis of our current political predicament, a warning for where we might be headed, and an eloquent plea for connection and the understanding of, as one character terms it, those who are “othery.”
Matthew Baker is author of the story collection “Hybrid Creatures” and the Edgar Award-nominated middle grade novel “If You Find This”. His stories have appeared in publications such as American Short Fiction, New England Review, One Story, Electric Literature, and Conjunctions, and in anthologies including Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions. A recipient of grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Blue Mountain Center, Prairie Center of the Arts, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, he has an MFA from Vanderbilt University, where he was the founding editor of Nashville Review.