Matthew Derby

Matthew Derby has taught creative writing at Brown University (where he also earned his MFA), held the post of assistant fiction editor for the literary magazine 3rd Bed, and published stories in The Believer, Conjunctions, Fence, 5 Trope, Pindeldyboz and Failbetter among others. He’s even contributed his fair share of articles for this magazine, most recently on Scout Niblett and Arab Strap (both CP18). But none of these achievements fully explains why Derby has begun to make such a favorable impression on small circles of literary-minded people, circles that include Neal Pollack, Dave Eggers and
Ben Marcus. That distinction goes to his debut novel.
Super Flat Times is a collection of surreal vignettes purporting to be a history of the future. This particular future,
however, is an odd one. Meat is the sole foodstuff. Most women are hardly more than egg factories, complete with buttoned “uterine flaps” to expedite harvesting. Certain men skim across the sky on solidified brown globules of pollution perversely known as clouds; the government uses these same floating objects to advertise itself. All this led one Village Voice reviewer– in a notably positive analysis–to dub the work “a bizarrely seamless fusion of the haunting and the ridiculous.”