For years Joseph Mattson was a rambler, working as a farmer, fisherman, dishwasher, short-order cook, getaway driver, blood donor, home healthcare worker for the developmentally disabled and the clinically mentally insane, playing punk rock music, and too much more. He is the author of the collection of stories EAT HELL (Narrow Books) and EMPTY THE SUN: A Novel with Soundtrack by Six Organs of Admittance (A Barnacle Book/Drag City), which were the #1 and #10 bestselling Book Soup paperback fiction books of 2009, respectively, and is the editor of TWO LETTERS: COLLECTION OF ART & WRITING VOL. TWO (Narrow Books) and the forthcoming/tentative SPEED CHRONICLES (Akashic Books), an anthology of original fiction about the drug speed. Mattson's award-winning poetry and prose has been published in AMBIT, SLIPSTREAM, PEARL, and dozens more, and EMPTY THE SUN is currently a finalist for the 2010 SCIBA Fiction Award. 

An epical rambler still, miles under him have brought Mattson to far-flung nooks and corners of the world, including the deepest jungles of South America and Southeast Asia, both of which are informing some of his current projects, including the forthcoming novel COURTING THE JAGUAR (A Barnacle Book, 2011), "[a] brutal and exquisite mind-bending travelogue of immaculate conception, obsession, and vengeance in the swarthy guts of the Amazon Jungle" (Barnacle). Following COURTING THE JAGUAR, Mattson will remain ceaselessly at work on the novel HEXICO, a contemporary re-imagining of the West as if the Mexican Cession of 1848 never happened and the U.S./Mexican border is the spine of the continental divide rather than the desert Southwest, and wherein a beautiful T-girl is impregnated by a chupacabra and is on the run from both countries. 

Mattson tours constantly--though not as much as Six Organs of Admittance--invite him to your town and he will come. He has read at sold-out performances with Six Organs of Admittance, ARTHUR Magazine, Bret Easton Ellis, Jerry Stahl, and more, and has also been invited as a guest lecturer/reader at universities. Joseph's home base is Los Angeles, California.

For further info, please visit www.emptythesun.com, www.abarnaclebook.com, and www.narrowbooks.com.

TESTIMONIALS:

"Joseph Mattson writes like a guitar player with nineteen fingers--everywhere at once, stinging, dark, and beautiful." --JERRY STAHL, author of PERMANENT MIDNIGHT and PAIN KILLERS

"Several Passages [of EMPTY THE SUN] induced the shiver of aesthetic bliss in my spine that Nabokov famously described as the indicator of good and true writing." --JAMES GREER, author of GUIDED BY VOICES: A BRIEF HISTORY and THE FAILURE

"Joseph Mattson is a monster of a writer." --BETH LISICK, author of EVERYBODY INTO THE POOL and HELPING ME HELP MYSELF

"Joseph Mattson is one hell of a motherf--king writer." --JEFF GARLIN, author of MY FOOTPRINT: CARRYING THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD and co-star and executive producer of HBO's CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM

"As ROLLING STONE once said about Public Enemy, EMPTY THE SUN doesn't just break new ground--it's become the new ground to break." --Dan Collins, LA RECORD

"EMPTY THE SUN balances its verbal and narrative excesses with emotional substance and a convincing variation on the theme of loss. Mattson makes it clear that this is not just a Thompsonian exercise in self-medicated wild-man alienation [...] it's the raw eccentricity of his prose and storytelling that holds you for the ride..." --Steve Miller, THE BOSTON PHOENIX

Author Photo by KURT MANGUM, www.kurtmangumphoto.com