News on Suburgian

Review of Trisha Ready's Nobuko in The Stranger

matt@mattbriggs.com (Matt Briggs) — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I recently reviewed Trisha Ready’s novel Nobuko in The Stranger.

Ready has created a work that is accessible in its language and engaging in its vignette-driven storytelling, yet also richly layered for those who listen to its syntax. Nobuko is an invitation to consider the smallest units of writing: the choice of a period or a conjunction, the decision to repeat a word. In this way, Ready’s book joins a literary tradition that spans Stein to Kawakami, affirming that style and morality, form and feeling, are deeply intertwined. A quiet revelation of a novel, Nobuko asks us to find meaning not in high drama, but in the spaces between the words.
– Read the full review in The Stranger

New story in Bull Fiction

matt@mattbriggs.com (Matt Briggs) — Sat, 06 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Funnel | Fiction by Matt Briggs (Mar 19, 2014)

“I observed immediately that dating was identical to looking for a job. You needed to send out a lot of resumes. You needed to interview to find a promising match. But you didn’t need to make a career of it. I essentially created a sales funnel.”

Read the story

New story in Pacifica Literary Review

matt@mattbriggs.com (Matt Briggs) — Tue, 23 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The orbital spiders began to go to work in late August. The mornings still held the warmth of the previous night. The moths came out of the marshland across the street. They hit the deck lamp at the back of the house. When I walked the dog to the elementary playground and back at dusk, I could see the moths arrive like a snowfall in reverse. Their bodies white in the glare, drifted from the swampy ground into lamp light. An orbital spider had set her snare. From her prime location, she’d grown much larger than the competition. A spider must have logical limits of growth, and yet this spider’s size seemed determined by how many moths she ate. There was no logical limit to that. I have looked for her in the daylight to remove her so as not to make her angry. I don’t want to run into her golf ball sized abdomen in the dark. She has eat moths by the pound. At her current size she could consume sparrows, bats, stray chihuahuas.

The Seattle Times on Twin Peaks and Snoqualmie

matt@mattbriggs.com (Matt Briggs) — Tue, 24 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I enjoyed talking to Megan Burbank about Snoqualmie, North Bend, Twin Peaks, and an essay I wrote for Moss Lit a while back. Megan wrote, “Twin Peaks remains the perfect audiovisual accompaniment for our dark Pacific Northwest nights, with their gray frieze of winter that-for now-still feels dependable”.

You can read Megan Burbank’s article in The Seattle Times, Twin Peaks, Northwest’s pioneering mystery, finds new generation of fans with return to TV for the best of the decade in TV.