Brendan Mathews curates epic story in critically acclaimed debut novel
Like all faculty at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Brendan Mathews encourages curiosity in his creative writing and literature classes.
His critically acclaimed debut novel, The World of Tomorrow, is an outgrowth of his own fascination with the collisions of history and family, and with using fiction as a way to explore the vital questions that confront us all.
Brendan at a book launch event at the Lenox Library. Photo by Peter Hahn
Before The World of Tomorrow hit bookstore shelves across the country, it was already creating buzz in the literary world, with starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, and Library Journal. In June 2017, Publishers Weekly called Brendan a “writer to watch.” Since publication in September, the book has been named an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times Book Review and included on must-read lists in Entertainment Weekly, O. The Oprah Magazine,The New York Post, Seattle Times, and others.
Writing in BookPage, Tom Deignan called Brendan’s book “a sweeping, impressive accomplishment.… Mathews has written an insightful immigrant epic, not to mention a first-class literary thriller.” The Chicago Tribune wrote, “Mathews has big, rambunctious talent that promises great things.”
Taking place over the course of one week in June 1939, The World of Tomorrow is a thrilling story of the Dempsey brothers—two running from the Irish Republican Army and the third a struggling musician in New York City trying to support his family—and a sprawling cast of characters that includes an assassin trying to escape his old life, but tasked with one last job by a vengeful mob boss; a Jewish photographer faced with returning to Nazi-occupied Prague; an heiress underestimated by those around her; and a couple of young jazz musicians trying to realize their dreams in Harlem.
As the story leads up to the king and queen of England’s historic visit to the 1939 World’s Fair, where visitors are promised a peek into “the world of tomorrow,” Brendan captures the climate at that time: a nation in the grip of the Great Depression, while Europe braces itself for the outbreak of another war.
An admired professor at Simon’s Rock since 2007, where he also serves as head of the Division of Languages and Literature, Brendan shares his writing skills and literary interests with his students. For over a decade, he has been publishing short stories—two have appeared in the annual Best American Short Stories anthology—and he has even incorporated his own writing in his spring Fiction Workshop.
Brendan is always transparent about the writing process in his classroom. Lia Russell-Self ’11 recalled Brendan assigning one of his own short stories and then showing the class all of the iterations the story had, how many times it changed, and why it changed. It exemplified to her that “writing is not a stagnant art; writers are always curating a story.”
Lia, who received her bachelor of arts in Creative Writing and Theater Arts, said Brendan was an integral part of her success at Simon’s Rock. “He came to every class with passion and focus. He helped students understand literature, and to understand that they didn’t have to rush the process of writing.”
It took Brendan seven and a half years to research and write his novel. “I had to
learn a different way of writing once I committed to the novel. In the short story,
every word has to feel necessary and essential. But the novel gives you room to spread
out, and with this novel in particular, I was intentionally digressive. I wanted a
book that was, like life, hard to contain, and where no single storyline was ‘the
center’ of the story.”
Brendan’s pursuits in and out of the classroom have fueled him as a writer. “The faculty at Simon’s Rock have a lot of freedom to explore their interests, and to teach a broad range of topics. Often what I taught in the classroom found expression in the novel, and the concerns of the novel found their way into my teaching.”
Thanks to a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Teaching and Research Award, Brendan spent a semester teaching in the graduate creative writing program at University College Cork. When not in the classroom, he was conducting research for his novel: exploring Ireland with his family, interviewing historians, and rifling through archives.
Brendan drew from his own family history to develop some of the characters. His grandfather, who emigrated from Ireland to New York in 1929 with aspirations of becoming a big-band arranger, inspired the oldest of the Dempsey brothers. Brendan’s maternal grandparents, both from the Bronx, influenced his perception of the characters and scenes in the Bronx.
As Brendan infused a fictional storyline with a factual timeline, he found he could turn to faculty and students to help him fill in the blanks: He discussed Count Basie with music professor Larry Wallach, 1920s Prague with literature professor Peter Filkins, and collected ideas and images from students who played musical instruments, or had recently traveled to cities mentioned in the novel.
Throughout the writing process, Brendan also turned to other writers and genres—often drawing on works that appeared in his class syllabi—including contemporary authors Don DeLillo (Libra), Edward P. Jones (The Known World), and Margaret Atwood (The Blind Assassin); Irish poet William Butler Yeats; and William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. He compared the thriller aspect of his novel to that of other “hard-boiled detective novels” like The Big Sleep.
“I tell my students, to write well you have to read widely. I have read more during my time at Simon’s Rock than ever before.”
-Brendan Mathews
Three days after The World of Tomorrow was released, Brendan read in front of a hometown audience at a book launch hosted by the Lenox Library, where he wrote a good portion of the book. “It was great to start at home. Writing the book was a private pursuit for so long, it was nice to share it with my hometown.”
Throughout September, Brendan gave public readings at locations from Brooklyn to the Berkshires. In early October, he read at a gathering of alumni, parents, and friends in Boston for the first in the Simon’s Rock Salon series this fall, and was recently in New York City. An upcoming salon will be held in Chicago (November 11). A Faculty Forum on campus allowed Brendan to share his book with the Simon’s Rock community for the first time, which he called “really rewarding.”
During Family Weekend, students and their families had the good fortune to hear Brendan read from The World of Tomorrow on October 27 in the Daniel Arts Center as part of the Faculty Salon.
A second novel isn’t out of the question, but right now, Brendan is looking forward to revising previously written short stories for a collection that will appear in early 2019.