Readers' rating:
Published Sep 2019
192 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Bloomland opens during finals week at a fictional southern university, when a student walks into the library with his roommate's semi-automatic rifle and opens fire. When he stops shooting, twelve people are dead.
In this richly textured debut, John Englehardt explores how the origin and aftermath of the shooting impacts the lives of three characters: a disillusioned student, a grieving professor, and a young man whose valuation of fear and disconnection funnels him into the role of the aggressor. As the community wrestles with the fallout, Bloomland interrogates social and cultural dysfunction in a nation where mass violence has become all too familiar.
Profound and deeply nuanced, Bloomland is a dazzling debut for fans of Denis Johnson and We Need to Talk About Kevin.
"Englehardt's brilliant and insanely brave debut is a culturally diagnostic achievement ... Hugely important, hauntingly brutal—Englehardt has just announced himself as one of America's most talented emerging writers." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"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 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...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!
This information about Bloomland was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
John Englehardt won the Dzanc Books Prize in Fiction. His work has appeared in Vol.1 Brooklyn, Sycamore Review, The Stranger, Seattle Review of Books, Conium Review, Monkeybicycle, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Arkansas, and currently teaches writing classes at Hugo House in Seattle.
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