RaveThe Cleveland Review of BooksIn service of these entangled narratives and ambitious themes, Bell’s prosaic lyricism is especially noteworthy. The rich and vivid sentences of Appleseed are as visceral and sensuous as the landscapes Bell paints; landscapes that suffer annihilation across centuries at the hand of industry, greed, and exceptionalism ... From eighteenth-century fur trappers, to the reprinting of recycled dead Bison into climate-resilient beta copies, to a manufactured Ice Age, Bell shows us the costs of living with a narrow, immediate, and self-serving worldview ... Part Greco-Roman myth, part American folklore, part sci-fi epic, and all literary heart, Matt Bell’s Appleseed serves as a timely warning cry for our collective, fragile future, showing us the violent shades of the Anthropocene, and what might happen to the wild, natural world when the unnatural manifests a fabricated natural.
