Sunday, February 28, 2016

The Tyrant Bride


'The Tyrant Bride' is a letterpress printed pamphlet that is now available at Big Cartel. It's one book of ten in an ongoing wedding-themed material novel called The Hitch: An Agamist Manifesto. While the ten books are thematically and often narratively related, each contains its own visual and textural theme, and the prose shifts in genre, from fiction to experimental memoir to lifestyle magazine feature to dramatic script.


'The Tyrant Bride', subtitled 'As droplets hover above her like spots', is a theatrical short story in which a bridezilla-type figure recounts various nightmarish weddings that have haunted her. Her visions are told through text printed from metal type. The text is interspersed with a shifting configuration of spheres printed from photopolymer plates. To learn more about The Hitch, visit matt-runkle.com/thehitch.

Monday, February 8, 2016

'Artifice and authenticity ...'

'Artifice and authenticity are central themes tying together Matt Runkle's eclectic debut short story collection,' writes Pedro Ponce in a great writeup of The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales in the LA Review. 'While artifice is everywhere in these stories,' he continues, 'it is not a source of cynicism or despair; rather, artifice is elemental—a material both resistant and pliable, with which characters map and navigate reality.' Order a copy HERE!

Thursday, February 4, 2016

Printing The Hitch at Kala

I'm beginning a three-month residency at Kala Art Institute to print one of the ten chapbooks that will eventually make up The Hitch—an ongoing wedding-themed material novel. The installment I'm printing at Kala, titled 'The Victim', will be letterpress printed from a combination of metal type, photopolymer plates, monoprints from a PVA-painted collograph, and a reduction linocut. 'The Victim' takes a more distanced point of view than the rest of the chapbooks, using a mythic tone as it looks at the shadow side of the bridezilla. There's more info about The Hitch here.