The Blast

A novel full of heart and verve. Strikers, spies, propagandists, anarchists, immigrants, suffragettes, and provocateurs--schemers and dreamers all--converge in this portrait of turbulent pre-World War I San Francisco. Part political drama, part family mystery, The Blast is vividly imagined, a quintessentially American story of power and corruption, solidarity and sabotage. --Cara Hoffman, author of Running The Blast is quite simply a tour de force. Matthews brings to life a lost world of radicalism, in a riveting story that ripples out across multiple continents, with the entanglements of the personal and the political squarely in his sights. He has a keen ear for the passions, large and small, that impel women and men to take matters into their own hands. This is a novel for our troubled times. --Sasha Lilly, author of Catastrophism In this immersive novel, Joseph Matthews transports us to San Francisco at the dawn of its modern age: a restive town of immigrants and arrivistes, robber barons, and political radicals, where suffragettes and anarchists and Wobblies all fought to shape the city's future. In a taut narrative that's also a delight, this is essential reading about how and why what happens in that city has so often shaped America. --Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, author of Names of New York Joseph Matthews' gripping novel pulls back San Francisco's curtain of fog to explore what was America's most radical city. The novel's characters are entwined with the labor-left-anarchist-immigrant cultural stew that made the city so dynamic, all against the backdrop of revolutions in Mexico and Ireland, labor and women's rights struggles on both sides of the Atlantic, and the 1916 Preparedness Day bombing, a response to big capital's exhortations for the US to enter World War I, seeking to grow their fortunes and quash labor unions while wrapping themselves in that most cursed of refuges, 'patriotism.' --Peter Cole, author of Wobblies on the Waterfront A compelling and affecting novel, vividly bringing to life a complex and tumultuous chapter in the history of American class conflict. --Kenyon Zimmer, author of Immigrants against the State Joseph Matthews has done it again. With masterful storytelling, The Blast takes a deep dive into the ferment of San Francisco before World War I, revealing the complex racial, ethnic, gender, and class dynamics of a militant and multifaceted opposition movement pitted against the Bay Area's burgeoning plutocracy and its apparatus of repression. A compelling glimpse of what might have been and, perhaps more importantly, why it isn't. --Ward Churchill, author of Wielding Words Like Weapons