Bloomland opens during finals week at a fictional southern university, when a student walks into the library with his roommate's semi-automatic rifle and opens fire. When he stops shooting, twelve people are dead.
In this richly textured debut, John Englehardt explores how the origin and aftermath of the shooting impacts the lives of three characters: a disillusioned student, a grieving professor, and a young man whose valuation of fear and disconnection funnels him into the role of the aggressor. As the community wrestles with the fallout, Bloomland interrogates social and cultural dysfunction in a nation where mass violence has become all too familiar.
Profound and deeply nuanced, Bloomland is a dazzling debut for fans of Denis Johnson and We Need to Talk About Kevin.
"Englehardt's brilliant and insanely brave debut is a culturally diagnostic achievement in the same way that Don DeLillo's White Noise and Libra are culturally diagnostic achievements; his sentences are brutal and unflinching and yet mystically humane in the spirit of Denis Johnson's Angels; and his America is at once beautiful and love-swirled and a kaleidoscopic wreck-a land whose cultural geolo
Kirkus starred review
"A quiet, deeply moving book about trauma and its aftereffects. The characters-an aimless kid who opens fire in a university library, the instructor he murders, her husband, and the talented girlfriend of one of the victims-are all survivors of previous tragedies. Their stories are narrated by a young English professor who was involved with each of them, and his voice, disembodied, probing, sad, a
Molly Giles, author of All the Wrong Places
"Gripping, compelling, at once troubling and funny and deeply moving, Bloomland disturbs in all the right ways. John Englehardt has his finger on the pulse of America: our primitiveness and sophistication, our faith-hunger and empty yearning, our compulsion toward violence as the redemptive act, our relentless, romantic dance with death. With humor and insight and gorgeous prose, Englehardt traces
Rilla Askew, author of Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place
