Matthew McIntosh

Matthew McIntosh (born 1977 in Federal Way, WA) is an American writer known for his 2003 novel Well. His second novel, theMystery.doc, was published in 2017.

Matthew McIntosh
Born1977 (age 42–43)
Federal Way, WA
OccupationWriter
NationalityAmerican
Period2003–present
GenreFiction
Notable worksWell (2003)
theMystery.doc (2017)
Website
themysterybook.com

Biography

Early years

McIntosh is a native of Federal Way, Washington.[1] He graduated from the creative writing program at the University of Washington in Seattle after years of being enrolled on-and-off, during which time he held numerous menial jobs.[1] He also attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. As a second-year workshop student, he won Playboy magazine's short story contest for university students for his story "Fishboy."[2]

Well

McIntosh’s debut novel was published in 2003, when he was 26 years old.[3] Well is a series of vignettes about the bleak existence of desperate characters living in the Seattle suburb of Federal Way, Washington.[4] The book earned praise for its realistic characters,[3][5] stark writing style[1] and for being ambitious.[6] It was both praised and criticized for its structure and unrelated storylines.[5][7][8]

theMystery.doc

McIntosh's second novel, the 1,660-page theMystery.doc, was published by Grove Atlantic on October 3, 2017. He began working on it shortly after Well was published in 2003.[9] It tells the story of an amnesiac writer trying to write an ambitious follow-up novel to a previous work. It contains many subplots, unusual page layouts, styles and fonts, as well as photos.[10][11] The Washington Post called it "a supersize version of Well" and said that reading it "is like wandering through a gigantic art installation."[9]

Bibliography

Novels

Stories
  • "Fishboy," Playboy, October 2001 (as Matt McIntosh)[12]
  • "Chicken," Ploughshares, Spring 2001[13]
  • "Looking Out For Your Own," Puerto del Sol
gollark: I think it's kind of neat but also not hugely useful, inasmuch as it:- generates somewhat bad code, and without awareness of your preferred style and architecture- may not actually be faster than just writing the code yourself, since you have to specify things fairly precisely and filter its output for it to be any good
gollark: With a license comment, except it generated the wrong one.
gollark: It had an issue where it emitted the Quake fast inverse square root thing verbatim.
gollark: I finetuned GPT-2 117M on my Discord messages one time. It only needed a CSV file trivially generated from the GDPR data dump.
gollark: GPT-2/3 are just trained off unstructured unlabelled text. So they'd basically only need a HTML parser.

References
  1. John Marshall, “New Seattle novelist’s grasp of despair goes far beyond his years,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, September 4, 2003.
  2. Jim Jacobson, "UI student wins Playboy college writing contest," The Gazette (Cedar Rapids), March 20, 2011.
  3. Darren Reidy, “Books,” The Village Voice, September 23, 2002.
  4. “Well,” Publisher’s Weekly, May 19, 2003.
  5. Martha Southgate, “McIntosh’s ‘Well’: a promise of voice and energy,” Baltimore Sun, August 10, 2003.
  6. Jennifer Reese, "Books In Brief: Fiction," New York Times, October 26, 2003.
  7. Jessica Turner, “Cover Story: Well Enough Alone,” Cincinnati CityBeat, September 10, 2003.
  8. Martha Southgate, "Vignettes don't add up to a novel," Chicago Tribune, August 20, 2003.
  9. Steven Moore, "Finally, a novel that looks like a 21st-century production," Washington Post, October 24, 2017.
  10. Sam Sacks, "The Best New Fiction," Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2017.
  11. Jason Sheehan, "You're Going To Hate 'TheMystery.doc,' And That's OK," NPR, October 7, 2017.
  12. The FictionMags Index. Archived 2012-11-14 at the Wayback Machine Accessed June 8, 2013.
  13. Matthew McIntosh Author Detail, pshares.org, May 24, 2001.
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