Matthew Sullivan (2) (1970–)
Author of Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore
For other authors named Matthew Sullivan, see the disambiguation page.
About the Author
Image credit: Matthew Sullivan
Works by Matthew Sullivan
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Sullivan, Matthew
- Birthdate
- 1970
- Gender
- male
- Education
- University of Idaho (MFA)
- Occupations
- bookseller
teacher - Agent
- Kirby Kim (Janklow & Nesbit Literary Agency, literary)
Sean Daily (Hotchkiss & Associates, film and television) - Short biography
- Matthew Sullivan received his MFA from the University of Idaho and has been a resident writer at Yaddo, Centrum, and the Vermont Studio Center. His short stories have been awarded the Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize and the Florida Review Editor's Prize for Fiction and have been published in many journals, including The Chattahoochee Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Fugue, Evansville Review, and 580-Split. In addition to working for years at Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver and at Brookline Booksmith in Boston, he currently teaches writing, literature, and film at Big Bend Community College in the high desert of Washington State. The author of Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore, he is married to a librarian and has two children.
- Nationality
- USA
- Places of residence
- Denver, Colorado, USA
Anacortes, Washington, USA - Map Location
- USA
Members
Reviews
Lydia works in a bookstore that's frequented by a number of people she mentally refers to as "the BookFrogs": lonely, eccentric men who seem drawn to the bookstore because they have no place better to be. Then one night, one of the BookFrogs -- a troubled and intelligent young man named Joey -- hangs himself on the upper floor of the store. On his body, Lydia discovers an object with personal meaning for her, and as she tries to make sense of his death, she also finds her own past, in which show more she survived a horrific crime, coming back to haunt her.
I liked this one much more than I expected to. It's a story that seems like it really could have felt contrived and manipulative, but somehow everything about it just worked for me. The characters feel extremely believable. And while some of the revelations didn't come as much of a surprise, that didn't remotely feel like a problem. In the end, everything seemed to fit together in a very satisfying, if also very sad kind of way. show less
I liked this one much more than I expected to. It's a story that seems like it really could have felt contrived and manipulative, but somehow everything about it just worked for me. The characters feel extremely believable. And while some of the revelations didn't come as much of a surprise, that didn't remotely feel like a problem. In the end, everything seemed to fit together in a very satisfying, if also very sad kind of way. show less
I figured I was setting myself up for a huge disappointment when I let my enthusiasm about the cover of Matthew Sullivan’s Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore convince me that I really needed to read this one. That’s happened to me several times before when I chose a new book based solely on what I saw on the cover – especially, it seems, with books about, or set in, bookstores (a major weakness of mine). This one, though, did not disappoint.
Lydia Smith is a bookseller at the show more Bright Ideas bookstore, a young lady who truly loves books and what she does in the bookstore. And her customers love her right back - especially the BookFrogs, an eccentric group of regulars who claim the bookstore as a second home (for many of them, it’s their only home) and spend whole days there browsing or napping among the books. But when one of the BookFrogs hangs himself in the store at midnight, just before closing time, everything changes for Lydia for good. She will never, ever be the same.
Lydia not only discovers Joey’s body, she also learns that he has bequeathed all of his possessions – what little there are of them - to her. She already suspected that she was Joey’s favorite bookseller, but because Joey had only recently started actually speaking to her about himself a little, Lydia was taken by surprise by his gesture. What Lydia finds in Joey’s apartment is pretty much what she expects to find: lots of junk and lots of books. But when Lydia starts taking a closer look at the books in the apartment she begins to wonder what Joey was up to before his suicide. The books have been defaced in an apparently systematic way, with dozens of little windows cut into their pages, and Lydia knows that the key to what was going on in Joey’s head is hidden somewhere in the books he left behind.
Lydia has bloody secrets of her own, things about her childhood that she has shared with no one in the world, including her live-in boyfriend, David. But when she finds something from her childhood in Joey’s possession, it doesn’t make sense. Just who was Joey Molina, anyway? And does she really want to know the truth?
Bottom Line: Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore satisfies on a couple of different levels. Fans of “bookstore books” will be pleased that so much of the plot takes place inside, or around the day-to-day routine of, the bookstore itself in a way that reveals lots about the quirky store and its often eccentric employees and customers. But this one is also a good mystery about a murderous rampage perpetrated by a villain so spooky that a whole generation of children would never forget him. It’s a mystery with enough solid misdirection in it that I did not solve it until the author intended me to solve it. My only gripe concerns the book’s ending (long after the mystery itself is solved), an ending that is really a little too abrupt to be much satisfying. show less
Lydia Smith is a bookseller at the show more Bright Ideas bookstore, a young lady who truly loves books and what she does in the bookstore. And her customers love her right back - especially the BookFrogs, an eccentric group of regulars who claim the bookstore as a second home (for many of them, it’s their only home) and spend whole days there browsing or napping among the books. But when one of the BookFrogs hangs himself in the store at midnight, just before closing time, everything changes for Lydia for good. She will never, ever be the same.
Lydia not only discovers Joey’s body, she also learns that he has bequeathed all of his possessions – what little there are of them - to her. She already suspected that she was Joey’s favorite bookseller, but because Joey had only recently started actually speaking to her about himself a little, Lydia was taken by surprise by his gesture. What Lydia finds in Joey’s apartment is pretty much what she expects to find: lots of junk and lots of books. But when Lydia starts taking a closer look at the books in the apartment she begins to wonder what Joey was up to before his suicide. The books have been defaced in an apparently systematic way, with dozens of little windows cut into their pages, and Lydia knows that the key to what was going on in Joey’s head is hidden somewhere in the books he left behind.
Lydia has bloody secrets of her own, things about her childhood that she has shared with no one in the world, including her live-in boyfriend, David. But when she finds something from her childhood in Joey’s possession, it doesn’t make sense. Just who was Joey Molina, anyway? And does she really want to know the truth?
Bottom Line: Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore satisfies on a couple of different levels. Fans of “bookstore books” will be pleased that so much of the plot takes place inside, or around the day-to-day routine of, the bookstore itself in a way that reveals lots about the quirky store and its often eccentric employees and customers. But this one is also a good mystery about a murderous rampage perpetrated by a villain so spooky that a whole generation of children would never forget him. It’s a mystery with enough solid misdirection in it that I did not solve it until the author intended me to solve it. My only gripe concerns the book’s ending (long after the mystery itself is solved), an ending that is really a little too abrupt to be much satisfying. show less
This is not the book that the title led me to think it was. It's darker, more compelling and much more moving than I expected.
For me, the title "Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore" suggested an upbeat, novel about people who love books doing slightly mysterious, clever, perhaps witty things. Maybe something similar to "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore". That's the kind of entertaining but not too challenging read I thought I'd signed up for.
Of course, the publisher's summary told me that show more the book started with a suicide but when I read:
When a bookshop patron commits suicide, it’s his favorite store clerk who must unravel the puzzle he left behind in this fiendishly clever debut novel from an award-winning short story writer.
I thought the suicide would have all the emotional impact of a body found in a locked room in an Agatha Christie murder mystery.
This book isn't a puzzle. It isn't cute. It's a story about a woman in her twenties, damaged by a night of violence when she was ten, for whom The Bright Ideas Bookstore is a place of refuge, not just a place of work. She is the bookseller who best connects with the "bookfrogs", the damaged, often homeless, always slightly lost, people who hand around the bookstore for its warmth and shelter as well as its books.
Finding one of the youngest bookfrogs just after he suicides in the store is not the start of a puzzle to be unravelled, it is a traumatic event that is the first tremor in a quake that will collapse her understanding of her own past and leave her scrambling to stand in the rubble.
Violence, rage, lust, betrayal, and deception and the damage that they inflict on the young and defenceless are the engines of this book. There is a tightly plotted mystery that is skillfully unfolded so that my perceptions of people and events are constantly challenged and changed until what really happened is revealed.
The heart of this book is neither violence nor mystery but how children, damaged by not receiving the love that they need and have a right to expect from their parents, find solace in books and sometimes in each other. For these people books are not just escapism, they are the sofa-cushion fort children build to defend themselves from dragons, they are a search for identity and meaning, they are objects of love.
This is a book filled with sadness, with bad decisions, with love overpowered by guilt or loss and with the genuine evil that sometimes finds us.
It's also a book about the persistence of the need for love and the possibility of survival through retaining the ability to be kind to others and yourself.
I voted for this book in the debut novel category on the GoodReads Choice Award 2017 nominations. I'm looking forward to Matthew Sullivan's next book.
I listened to the audiobook version of "Midnight At The Bright Ideas Bookstore" which is perfectly narrated by Madeleine Maybe. show less
For me, the title "Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore" suggested an upbeat, novel about people who love books doing slightly mysterious, clever, perhaps witty things. Maybe something similar to "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore". That's the kind of entertaining but not too challenging read I thought I'd signed up for.
Of course, the publisher's summary told me that show more the book started with a suicide but when I read:
When a bookshop patron commits suicide, it’s his favorite store clerk who must unravel the puzzle he left behind in this fiendishly clever debut novel from an award-winning short story writer.
I thought the suicide would have all the emotional impact of a body found in a locked room in an Agatha Christie murder mystery.
This book isn't a puzzle. It isn't cute. It's a story about a woman in her twenties, damaged by a night of violence when she was ten, for whom The Bright Ideas Bookstore is a place of refuge, not just a place of work. She is the bookseller who best connects with the "bookfrogs", the damaged, often homeless, always slightly lost, people who hand around the bookstore for its warmth and shelter as well as its books.
Finding one of the youngest bookfrogs just after he suicides in the store is not the start of a puzzle to be unravelled, it is a traumatic event that is the first tremor in a quake that will collapse her understanding of her own past and leave her scrambling to stand in the rubble.
Violence, rage, lust, betrayal, and deception and the damage that they inflict on the young and defenceless are the engines of this book. There is a tightly plotted mystery that is skillfully unfolded so that my perceptions of people and events are constantly challenged and changed until what really happened is revealed.
The heart of this book is neither violence nor mystery but how children, damaged by not receiving the love that they need and have a right to expect from their parents, find solace in books and sometimes in each other. For these people books are not just escapism, they are the sofa-cushion fort children build to defend themselves from dragons, they are a search for identity and meaning, they are objects of love.
This is a book filled with sadness, with bad decisions, with love overpowered by guilt or loss and with the genuine evil that sometimes finds us.
It's also a book about the persistence of the need for love and the possibility of survival through retaining the ability to be kind to others and yourself.
I voted for this book in the debut novel category on the GoodReads Choice Award 2017 nominations. I'm looking forward to Matthew Sullivan's next book.
I listened to the audiobook version of "Midnight At The Bright Ideas Bookstore" which is perfectly narrated by Madeleine Maybe. show less
This astonishingly well-crafted novel is an outstanding read. There is much to admire in this multi-faceted book. It can be read as a mystery; as a sociological criticism of the US’s inadequate foster care / adoption policies; but more importantly it shines a light onto our systemic neglect of mental and emotional illness in all of us, and often their obvious and preventable causes.
So many of the realistic characters experience unfathomable pain, anguish, sorrow, and regret. Sullivan’s show more robust writing skills draw the reader into this tsunami of suffering; compelling us to absorb and feel the distress.
While it could be easy to see the many books, libraries, and bookstores described in Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore as just background, I believe that would be wrong. I would argue that words; spoken or written; the availability of books, ideas and learning provided by libraries and bookstores as a whole may be the most central character of all.
Most of the novel’s vulnerable and ‘damaged’ characters share their love and need of; dependence on books, and book spaces, primarily Tomas, Lydia, Joey, Lyle and Raj. Words and books can and have changed lives.
I have questions. From the beginning of the novel Tomas was anxious and anti-social. Why? Why towards the end is David dismissed? I felt he was good for Lydia. Lydia and Raj, really? Isn’t that throwing Lydia back into a reminder of a bizarre childhood and a traumatic nightmare? Is Sullivan indicating that is where Lydia needs to be to process her fear? Would love to discuss with other readers.
Excellent book. show less
So many of the realistic characters experience unfathomable pain, anguish, sorrow, and regret. Sullivan’s show more robust writing skills draw the reader into this tsunami of suffering; compelling us to absorb and feel the distress.
While it could be easy to see the many books, libraries, and bookstores described in Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore as just background, I believe that would be wrong. I would argue that words; spoken or written; the availability of books, ideas and learning provided by libraries and bookstores as a whole may be the most central character of all.
Most of the novel’s vulnerable and ‘damaged’ characters share their love and need of; dependence on books, and book spaces, primarily Tomas, Lydia, Joey, Lyle and Raj. Words and books can and have changed lives.
I have questions. From the beginning of the novel Tomas was anxious and anti-social. Why? Why towards the end is David dismissed? I felt he was good for Lydia. Lydia and Raj, really? Isn’t that throwing Lydia back into a reminder of a bizarre childhood and a traumatic nightmare? Is Sullivan indicating that is where Lydia needs to be to process her fear? Would love to discuss with other readers.
Excellent book. show less
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- Works
- 2
- Members
- 2,050
- Popularity
- #12,549
- Rating
- 3.7
- Reviews
- 157
- ISBNs
- 41
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- 2
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