THIS IS NOT A LOVE SONG

This engrossing first story collection by rising star Brendan Mathews is packed with compelling tales such as "My Last Attempt to Explain to You What Happened with the Lion Tamer," in which a love triangle complicates things between a lion tamer, a trapeze artist, and the strongman. Mathews effortlessly weaves irresistible stories from a wide array of situations, as in "Airborne," in which a couple's obsession with a mold in their house causes them to tear it apart plank by plank.

A worker in architectural salvage trying to two-time his boss by stealing a valuable antique, a father and his sons haggling over the family business during high-stakes rounds of golf, and a widow of the Bosnian conflict recalling her husband's demise and her dramatic escape are only a few of the warm and intimately revealed characters populating Mathews's enchanting collection.

This Is Not a Love Song is proof positive that Mathews is every bit the expert minimalist that he was the boisterous maximalist, as each of these ten stories brings its world and its sympathetic characters to life with vivid detail, emotional precision, and winning humor.


Brendan Mathews has been compared to Michael Chabon, E. L. Doctorow, and Dennis Lehane. Mathews' debut novel, THE WORLD OF TOMORROW, "a big, expressive debut" (Wall Street Journal), was named one of Entertainment Weekly's "20 Must-Read Books of the Fall," a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, one of the New York Post's 15 Books You Won't Be Able to Put Down this Fall, one of Kirkus's 13 Debuts and Breakthroughs That Live Up to the Hype, and one of Southern Living's 50 Heart-Pounding Historical Novels to Read Right Now.