Winner of the VCU Cabell First Novel Award Winner of the 2018 Dzanc Prize for Fiction An Indies Introduce Pick A Kirkus Best Books of 2019 selection Spanning two decades,  Bloomland  examines the social roots and community fallout of a shooting at a fictional southern university. As the narrative moves between the lives of a disillusioned student, a grieving professor, and the shooter himself, the psyches and stories of each character blend and intersect, ultimately asking us to rethink American myths of selfhood, grief, and violence as a redemptive act. Profound and deeply nuanced,  Bloomland  is a dazzling debut that walks in step with the novels of Carth Greenwell, Rachel Kushner, and Louise Erdrich. "Cycling between these characters observed and addressed, Bloomland juxtaposes the proximate with the predator, intermingling their perspectives until the flickering becomes a bloody tapestry of our beleaguered nation." — Washington Post "Englehardt’s brilliant and insanely brave debut is a culturally diagnostic achievement in the same way that Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Libra are culturally diagnostic achievements; his sentences are brutal and unflinching and yet mystically humane in the spirit of Denis Johnson’s Angels ; and his America is at once beautiful and love-swirled and a kaleidoscopic wreck—a land whose cultural geology mirrors its physical one, routinely generating the “mindless malignancy” of town-wrecking tornadoes and desperate young men with guns." —Kirkus starred review "John Englehardt’s Bloomland is the sobering novel America needs right now...a sobering insight to the aftermath of a tragedy written in a unique perspective." —Debutiful "Potent...Englehardt’s debut poses timely, difficult questions." — Publishers Weekly "Set in Arkansas, Bloomland feels through and through like a novel in the southern tradition. Its cadence, its understanding of human nature—by which I mean it has a keen eye for how we behave both alone and in groups—and its complicated relationship with poverty and religion all resonate like a book by a southern author." — Seattle Review of Books " Bloomland is a perfect mix of realism and fabulism, of confrontation and remoteness." —Santa Fe Writers Project "A powerful, ambitious novel that bravely takes on one of the most perplexing, terrifying, and uniquely American phenomena: the school shooting. ... One can only hope future readers will pick up Englehardt’s novel to understand an idiosyncratic period of our history when we abjured our safety and the lives of our children." —Heavy Feather Review "Gorgeously written, intrepid by design, and deeply disconcerting in its authenticity, Bloomland is a remarkable achievement and stands out as an incredibly important novel of our time." — Arkansas International "Considering that we’re bombarded daily with footage from ground zero of one act of mass violence after another, I ask, 'Do we need a novel about it?' After finishing the last page of John Englehardt’s stark, yet heartbreakingly human novel, Bloomland , the answer is a confident, 'Yes, we do.'" —The Florida Review "A quiet, deeply moving book about trauma and its aftereffects. The characters—an aimless kid who opens fire in a university library, the instructor he murders, her husband, and the talented girlfriend of one of the victims—are all survivors of previous tragedies. Their stories are narrated by a young English professor who was involved with each of them, and his voice, disembodied, probing, sad, and oddly complicitous, gives the book an eerie, haunting strength. I read Bloomland in one sitting and have been thinking about it ever since." —Molly Giles, author of All the Wrong Places "Gripping, compelling, at once troubling and funny and deeply moving, Bloomland disturbs in all the right ways. John Englehardt has his finger on the pulse of America: our primitiveness and sophistication, our faith-hunger and empty yearning, our compulsion toward violence as the redemptive act, our relentless, romantic dance with death. With humor and insight and gorgeous prose, Englehardt traces the multiple faces of mass violence, giving us a stark and true and telling portrait of a place and a people in the heart of the country. This is a stunning debut." —Rilla Askew, author of Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place " Bloomland , as its title suggests, is a garden of dark delights. Wise to the point of faint aphorism, but never glib, Englehardt guides us with a sure hand through the intimate terrain of collective horrors—acts of God and acts of man, not so different as one might think. I surfaced at the end as if from a deep immersion, feeling as though I'd been carried very far away—not drowned, buoyed—to a place that, seen so sharply, looked, frighteningly and reassuringly, like home." —Padma Viswanathan, author of The Ever After of Ashwin Rao "This book is crammed full of sentences so bru