Glass Eel is available anywhere books are sold on March 2, 2027.

Preorder at umasspress.com using code UMASS20 to save 20%. You can also support your favorite local indie bookstore by ordering through Bookshop.org

Praise for Glass Eel:

“This is a narrative project about confinement and punishment in a world which feels uncomfortably near our own, and yet it never feels claustrophobic or narrow in scope. Instead it becomes numinous and consolatory in its experimental approach and audacity. There’s a real sense of freedom in terms of how Casey Bell moves between periods of time and memory, narrative structures, and points of view, though of course this feeling of freedom can only come from careful and painstaking authorial work. Bell captures the feeling of despair and terror which comes from arbitrary shifts in law, and yet this is a hopeful book about how we survive and are sustained by community and hope. I thought of Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks, and Margaret Atwood, but Casey Bell has staked out a marvelous, unbounded territory of her own, where glass eels speak to us and the world is larger and more interconnected than we ever realized.”—Kelly Link, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Book of Love

“Glass Eel shuffles the cards of causality to emphasize how women struggle against abasement. Reader, let these nightmare quotidians inspire your allegiance to all Bell writes.”—Terese Svoboda, author of The Long Swim

“Glass Eel is a wild book! I loved it! Inventive, strange and deeply unsettling. A view of a terrifying near future that’s increasingly becoming less absurdist and more bleakly probable. I was so glad E and M had each other to navigate the American hellscape.”—Katya Apekina, author of Mother Doll

“Glass Eel is a startling, brilliant, deeply original tour de force. Casey Bell explores female embodiment with exquisitely granular detail, and sheds fresh light on the grotesque systems that churn and clog beneath the surface and impact us all. She reminds us that kindness and hope can survive even the most toxic environments, and are ultimately what will save us. This book blew my mind and shored up my heart and filled me with awe and gratitude for Bell’s singular, spectacular voice.”
—Gayle Brandeis, author of Drawing Breath: Essays on Writing, The Body, and Loss

“With wildly innovative structure and kaleidoscopic scope, Glass Eel explodes the conventions of the novel and rebuilds the form anew, offering an exhilarating, intimate portrait of female friendship, survival, and defiance. Absolutely revelatory.”—Claire Stanford, author of Happy for You