When Things Get Dark A Mongolian Winter's Tale

"Matthew Davis's portrait of Mongolia is riveting, insightful, and deeply honest. He captures the timeless elements of this remarkable country --the glorious history, the wide-open landscapes --but he also writes about the forces that shape today's Mongol society. As a teacher he experiences it all firsthand: he lives in a nomad-style ger ; he drinks too much, like the locals; he witnesses the mass migration to the cities and foreign countries. He even finds himself caught up in a quarantine for the plague. It's rare for a young person to have such intimate contact with such a distant country, and even rarer for him to write about it so well."-- Peter Hessler, author of Country Driving , River Town, and Oracle Bones At 23, Matt Davis moved to a remote Mongolian town to teach English.What he found when he arrived was a town'”and a country'”undergoing wholesale change from a traditional, countryside existence to a more urban, modern identity. When Things Get Dark documents these changes through the Mongolians Matt meets, but also focuses on the author's downward spiral into alcohol abuse and violence--a scenario he saw played out by many of the Mongolian men around him. Matt's self-destruction culminates in a drunken fight with three men that forces him to a hospital to have his kidneys X-rayed. He hits bottom in that cold hospital room, his body naked and shivering, a bloodied Mongolian man staring at him from an open door, the irrational thought in his head that maybe he is going to die there. His personal struggles are balanced with insightful descriptions of customs and interactions, and interlaced with essays on Mongolian history and culture that make for a fascinating glimpse of a mysterious place and people.

MATTHEW DAVIS is a MFA graduate of the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program and currently a graduate student at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. A chapter of this book has won the 2005 Atlantic Monthly prize in nonfiction and another chapter was a "notable essay" in the 2006 Best American Travel Writing series. Matt lives in Washington, D.C.