Works by
Mitch Cullin
(Writer)
[March 23, 1968 - ]

Fiction

• The Post-War Dream: A Novel (2008)
  Hollis and Debra have settled into their golden years in a gated community outside of Tucson. Although they are devoted to each other, events that took place decades earlier have left Hollis with a deep-seated trauma–and with a secret he has never been able to share with his wife. When Debra is diagnosed with cancer, she makes her husband a simple request–“Tell me about us”–which forces Hollis to revisit his past.
  
  In 1950, Hollis fought in the Korean War alongside the bigoted but charismatic Bill McCreedy. McCreedy seems to have it all, although he is a mercurial soldier whose ungovernable behavior is often at odds with what Hollis believes to be right. Now, years later, Hollis is haunted by memories of McCreedy and his own wartime actions that he had tried to suppress. These recollections eventually lead him from the body-strewn battlefields of Korea to the remote farmhouse in Texas where McCreedy had grown up–and for the first time he finds himself examining his and Debra’s life to understand how chance had played a hand in bringing them together.
  
  Mitch Cullin, one of today’s most celebrated young novelists, captures some of the most difficult themes in literature: fate, love, and death. The Post-War Dream is literary fiction of the highest order.

• A Slight Trick of the Mind (2005)
  Mitch Cullin’s absorbing A Slight Trick of the Mind is an original portrait of literature’s most beloved detective, Sherlock Holmes, in the twilight of his illustrious life.
  
  Holmes—“a genius in whom scientific curiosity is raised to the status of heroic passion”—is famous for his powers of deduction. His world is made up of hard evidence and uncontestable facts, his observations and conclusions unsullied by personal feelings, until novelist Cullin goes behind the cold, unsentimental surface to reveal for the first time the inner world of an obsessively private man.
  
  It is 1947, and the long-retired Holmes, now 93, lives in a remote Sussex farmhouse, where his memories and intellect begin to go adrift. He lives with a housekeeper and her young son, Roger, whose patient, respectful demeanor stirs paternal affection in Holmes. Holmes has settled into the routine of tending his apiary, writing in journals, and grappling with the diminishing powers of his razor-sharp mind, when Roger comes upon a case hitherto unknown. It is that of a Mrs. Keller, the long-ago object of Holmes’s deep—and never acknowledged—infatuation.
  
  As Mitch Cullin weaves together Holmes’s hidden past, his poignant struggle to retain mental acuity, and his unlikely relationship with Roger, Holmes is transformed from the machine-like, mythic figure into an ordinary man, confronting and acquiescing to emotions he has resisted his entire life. This subtle and wise work is more than just a reimagining of a classic character. It is a profound meditation on faultiness of memory and how, as we grow older, the way we see the world is inevitably altered.

• UnderSurface (2002) with Peter I. Chang, Illustrator
  From acclaimed author Mitch Cullin, whose previous books have been described by The New York Times as "brilliant and beautiful...rhythmic and telling," comes Undersurface, a chilling page-turner that recalls Alfred Hitchcock and novelist Kobo Abe at his most existential. Probing the complex relationship between outward appearances and inward states of profound want, it is a story that at turns is intriguing and sordid, poetic and allusive, told in a compact yet intense manner, offering a distinctive take on a society far more complicated than what Americans often gather from their televisions and newspaper headlines.
  
  Based roughly on real events, this fictional account follows its oblique protagonist as he moves through the loitering subculture found within public toilets and pornographic arcades, and, in the process, finds himself loosing everything he values, including his own grip on reality.
  
  A mystery of both memory and mistaken identity, Undersurface is a starkly written, haunting novel about double lives, compulsion, and human sexuality, where secret desires lead to devastating circumstances.
  
  As the carefully crafted plot twists in ever suspenseful directions, we are drawn toward a startling, possibly unavoidable conclusion, one which resonates long after the book has been set aside.
  
  Complimented by the richly evocative imagery of artist Peter I. Chang, Mitch Cullin has once again written a subtly detailed, affecting, provocative story that explores the sometimes harsh days of a man on the run, the enigmatic pull of the taboo, and the nature of transient life amongst a growing suburban culture.

• The Cosmology of Bing (2001)

• Branches (2000) with Ryuzo Kikushima, Illustrator

• Tideland (2000)
  Welcome to the world of Jeliza-Rose, the young female narrator of Mitch Cullin’s provocative new novel, Tideland. And what exactly has brought Jeliza-Rose from Los Angeles to rural Texas? And why won’t her father talk to her anymore, preferring instead to gaze at the wall? And who is making all that racket in the attic? In a story which is at times suspenseful, darkly surreal, and often humorous, Jeliza-Rose drifts from the harsh reality of her childhood, escaping into the fantasies of her own active imagination where fireflies have names, bog men awaken at dusk, monster sharks swim down railroad tracks, and disembodied Barbie heads share in her adventures.
  
  In the tradition of such cult classics as Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory, Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy, and William Goyen’s The House of Breath, Mitch Cullin’s novel introduces us to an extraordinary world as created by an extraordinary narrator—Jeliza-Rose. Like his previous novels (Whompyjawed, Branches), Cullin offers up a unique voice, one that moves through a landscape populated with singular characters and stark imagery: a remote farmhouse in Texas owned by Noah, an aging rockabilly guitarist; the mysterious Dell, who wanders her property in a beekeeper’s hood; Dickens, the childlike man with an affinity for maps of the ocean floor, his wigwam, and sticks of dynamite. Set amongst grassy fields, alongside an abandoned quarry, in dim bedrooms and mesquite-shaded trails, Tideland illuminates those moments when the fantastic emerges from seemingly common occurrences and lives–and a lonely child discovers magic and danger behind even the most mundane of events.
  Movie (2007)  DVD

• Whompyjawed (1999)
  Football is Willy Keeler's ticket out of West Texas, but only if he can keep the explosive combination of his intellect and hormones from destroying his high-school career. Not an easy task as he also contends with the endless demands of his girlfriend, mother, coach, and college recruiters. When a startling sexual encounter with a classmate and a consuming infatuation with one of his mother's friends threaten to shatter his fragile balance, Willy discovers that simply figuring out who he is may be the greatest challenge of all.
  
  Reminiscent of J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and Larry McMurtry's The Last Picture Show, Mitch Cullin's Whompyjawed is an unforgettable coming-of-age story, told with unparalleled humor and compassion.

Short Stories

• From the Place in the Valley Deep in the Forest: Stories (2002)
  An astronomer grieving over the death of his wife; an Asian-American medic bicycling through the countryside where she once held dying soldiers; the words of a Beatles’ song sung in a Cambodian work camp; a young rock-a-billy aficionado slicking back his hair in a Ukrainian village; a group of housewives smoking cigars and playing cards while a tornado approaches their west Texas town; and a Native American castaway carving faces on trees—the stories and characters in this diverse collection of stories from the acclaimed novelist Mitch Cullin provide a fascinating gloss on events that have taken place in the second half of the 20th century. They begin at a remote Japanese beach house and end on an unnamed Alaskan island. These are stories about isolation, remembrances of past experiences, and the sometimes inaccurate nature of memory. Cullin’s stories examine individuals who have survived momentous, often horrific, social upheavals—where relationships and common day-to-day life are suddenly shaken by unforeseen circumstances.
  
  From the Place in the Valley Deep in the Forest is a collection that deftly suggests we are all emigrants from personal histories we recall only fleetingly—moments which draw us back, but, as we imagine them, seem increasingly difficult to grasp. These polished and graceful stories are further evidence of the kind of work that makes Cullin one of our best, young writers.

Movies

• I Want to Destroy America (2006), Mitch Cullin, producer;  director: Peter I. Chang, director; with Hisao Shinagawa  DVD
  Documentary about the street musician Hisao Shinagawa a Japanese singer/songwriter who has refused to give up on his elusive dream of success and stardom regardless of personal cost and the solitary reality of his life. For 42 years he has cast himself as the Japanese Bob Dylan. Moving from Tokyo to America in 1974 following in the footsteps of his hero Woody Guthrie he befriended Johnny Cash and Townes Van Zandt after hitchhiking to Nashville. Now at 60 he plays his music on the streets of Los Angeles while living in near poverty still hoping to find an audience in a manner that is admirable bittersweet and ultimately heartbreaking.

Other

• The Flash (2007), Peter Wild, ed.
  100 writers, 100 stories; all proceeds to Amnesty International.

• Wonderlands: Good Gay Travel Writing (2004)
  Living up to its title, Wonderlands comes fueled by wanderlust and features every kind of wonderland. In fact, the collection's contributors--a mix of established gay writers and the best of the new generation--don't settle for the obvious. Focusing on the sheer visceral thrill of travel, the adventure of it, they set out all over the world and always find something unexpected: love, passion, history, themselves. 
  
  The result is an anthology of dynamic writing that will motivate readers to book their next flight, or at least get them dreaming of other places. And the places are legion. Mack Friedman sets off into the deceptively butch wilds of Alaska. Robert Tewdwr Moss tracks through the back roads of Syria and his own version of Arabian Nights. Colm Tóibín discovers a Spanish Brigadoon and Edward Field drinks tea with Paul Bowles. For Wayne Koestenbaum Vienna is both a city of high low culture, and for Philip Gambone Asia becomes a place of second chances. Raphael Kadushin settles into the ethereal sun of a Dutch spring, Michael Lowenthal remembers a jarring encounter in the Scottish Highlands, and Tim Miller tallies the 1001 beds he has slept in all over the world. And Edmund White, in a classic of elegiac travel writing, recounts his harrowing drive through the Sahara with a man he loved.
  
  Contributors: Alistair McCartney, Boyer Rickel, Brian Bouldrey, Bruce Shenitz, Colm Tóibín, David Masello, Edmund White, Edward Field, J.S. Marcus, Mack Friedman, Matthew Link, Michael Lowenthal, Mitch Cullin, Philip Gambone, Raphael Kadushin, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Robert Tewdwr Moss, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Tim Miller.