In celebration of local author Matthew Müller’s debut short story collection, FIRST AID, we’ll be hosting a short reading, Q&A, and also sharing a custom, small-batch beer that we’ve brewed in celebration of (and inspired by) this work of literary fiction.

An extraordinary story collection, First Aid for Choking Victims is both fierce and unsparing in its precision, and deeply tender in its care and watchfulness. Matthew Zanoni Müller renders the most private truths of human longing with electric prose that echoes the oldest of myths.

-Karen Tucker, author of Bewilderness

Order your copy at Malarkey Books!

In his debut solo short story collection, First Aid for Choking Victims, author Matthew Zanoni Müller excavates his characters’ worldviews in bracing detail. A hidden camcorder in a kid’s jacket, the secret dance of a jellyfish, a terrifying ball of static light. Rich in detail and sumptuous atmosphere, Müller evokes the small moments – the changes of light and shadow in a character’s mind, the tectonic shifts and rumblings that break apart an inner world. Taught, bracing, these stories follow characters in regret, grief, religious turbulence, and inner questioning.

Matthew Zanoni Müller was born in Bochum, Germany and grew up in Eugene, Oregon and Upstate New York. He received his BA from Emerson College in Creative Writing and Literature, and his MFA in Fiction from Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers. He is an administrator at his local Community College and lives in Western Massachusetts. He has co-written a memoir with his father entitled Drops on the Water: Stories about Growing Up from a father and Son published by Loyola University’s Apprentice House press (2014). He also has work published in The Denver Quarterly, The Southeast Review, NANO Fiction, DecomP MagazinE, The Boiler Journal, Hippocampus, Halfway Down the Stairs and others.