M31

A Family Romance

Contributors

By Stephen Wright

On Sale
Jan 7, 2020
Page Count
256 pages
Publisher
Back Bay Books
ISBN-13
9780316427296

A “beautiful and terrifying” novel about family, faith, and the search for home (San Francisco Chronicle), set amidst a community of UFO cultists in middlest America.

As regular guests on late-night radio shows, Dash and Dot are the world’s most in-demand lecturers on the topic of UFOs and alien abduction. They believe that we are all descended from M31, the nearest galaxy to ours, and divide their time between life on the road and a decommissioned church in the Midwest. A radar dish on its steeple and a spaceship in its sanctuary complete the modern nuclear-family setting.

When a couple of UFO groupies arrive at the church with their own agenda, everything changes, brought to a head by their strange beliefs and the timeless difficulties of modern life. Dash and Dot set out on their last trip, their ultimate journey, with a destination that no one could foretell. Written with a fevered vividness and immediacy, M31: A Family Romance has been hailed as “a devastatingly forceful accomplishment” from “a star of the first magnitude” (the Washington Post).

  • PRAISE FOR M31: A FAMILY ROMANCE

    "Beautiful and terrifying. . . . M31 offers a big, bold look at the American family. It takes us far away and very close to home. . . . Stephen Wright is a . . . bright star in the literary sky." --San Francisco Chronicle

    "M31 is a devastatingly forceful accomplishment and reestablishes its author as a star of the first magnitude." --The Washington Post Book World

    "Mr. Wright's sentences buzz like high-tension wires. I enjoyed reading every word of M31, literally." --Russell Banks
  • PRAISE FOR STEPHEN WRIGHT

    Meditations in Green (1983)

    "Precisely that brutal hallucination we desperately wanted to end." --Don DeLillo

    "The best that any fiction about this war has offered." --Newsweek

    Going Native (1994)

    "An astonishing novel." --Toni Morrison

    The Amalgamation Polka (2007)

    "An extravagantly talented novelist. . . . For Wright, America, past and present, is Wonderland, a place of marvels and horrors from which not even the fortunate escape with their heads. " --Laura Miller, The New York Times Book Review

    "This dark and lyrical tale of madness and prophecy speaks uncannily from within its period, in the tradition of heartbroken humor, which America's lapses of faith in its own promise have always evoked in the finest of our storytellers, among whom Stephen Wright here honorably takes his place." --Thomas Pynchon

    "Quite simply an astonishing novel, brilliantly executed and beautifully written. Stephen Wright deserves to be famous and feted for it."
    --The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
  • Praise for Processed Cheese

    "Processed Cheese does for consumerism what Catch-22 did for war."
    Stephen King, bestselling author of IT and The Shining
  • "In novel after unsparing novel-each one gorgeous, too, and full of awe- Stephen Wright has emerged as a kind of modern-day Socrates hectoring a complacent citizenry to have a good hard look at its collective delusions. With Processed Cheese, he's written a novel so outrageous and diagnostic of our current ills, it will prove much stronger than hemlock. If you hope to keep up your venality, America, your cruelties, and your death wish, better string this court jester up by his toes."
    Joshua Ferris, author of The Dinner Party

Formats and Prices

Price

$16.99

Price

$22.99 CAD

Format

Format:

  1. Trade Paperback $16.99 $22.99 CAD
  2. ebook $11.99 $15.99 CAD

Stephen Wright

About the Author

Stephen Wright is a Vietnam veteran, MFA graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the author of four previous novels. He has received a Whiting Award in Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and has taught writing and literature at Iowa, Princeton, Brown, and The New School. He was born in Warren, Pennsylvania, and lives in New York City.

Learn more about this author