Kressel worked in downtown Manhattan during the September 11 attacks . He said that prior to the attack he used to " look up at the World Trade Center towers on my way to work and think , ' Those are our pyramids . They ’ll be here in a thousand years . ' A few weeks later , from that same street , I watched them crumble and was running with a thousand screaming people away from a debris cloud rapidly chasing us . If ever there was a message on the impermanence of things . " Kressel 's first novel , '' King of Shards '' , was published in 2015 . In a review on NPR the novel was called “ Majestic , resonant , reality-twisting madness . ” Kessel 's short stories have been published in a number of magazines including Lightspeed Magazine , Clarkesworld , Analog , Beneath Ceaseless Skies , Interzone , Apex Magazine , Electric Velocipede , and Nightmare Magazine . Anthologies including his stories are '' Mad Hatters and March Hares , Naked City , After '' , and '' The People of the Book '' . His stories have been translated into Chinese , Russian , Czech , Polish , French , Spanish , Croatian , and Romanian
September 11 attacks
September 11 attacks
Matthew Kressel