Fiction Collective 2 imprint: 69 books

Matthew Kirkpatrick’s debut, Light without Heat, is an inventive, surprising collection of short stories full of odd, marginal characters rendered with surreal humor and lyrical, often beautiful language.   Formally playful, these stories take the shape of biographies, instructions,...

Interconnected stories depicting the last years of a WWII bomber pilot, his relationship with his daughter as both child and adult, and his drift into infirmity and death. When life dwindles to its irrevocable conclusion, recollections are illuminated, even unto the grave. Such is the narrative...

Winner of FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize A grand tour of the edges of our lives, where glory and significance riot against the logic of living and the pall of tragedy. The Making Sense of Things is a collection of twelve stories that pulse with memory, magic, and myth—all...

Linda Perdido, the story of the antisocial Linda Perdido told by her well-behaved sister Qua, is a memoir like no other. Set in a vast and unknown region in the Midwest, Mac Wellman’s Linda Perdido chronicles the lives of two sisters: Linda and Qua Perdido. Linda is bad, acting out every...

While in many ways reaffirming the mythic dimension of being on the road romanticized in American pop and fold culture, Revelation Countdown also subtly undermines that view. These stories project onto the open road not the nirvana of personal freedom, but rather a type of freedom more closely resembling...

Seed is the story of Bill Starr’s final days. Childless but with a lifetime’s worth of possessions and a nearly infinite web of extended family, Bill endeavors to empty his house completely before he dies by summoning distant relatives to claim their inheritance. Many of his letters go unanswered,...

A collection of stories that limn the dangers of domesticity   In Lynn K. Kilpatrick’s In the House, anything can happen. A collection of shorts—lists, character sketches, directions, scripts, and instructions—In the House reveals the often conspicuous, yet frequently overlooked,...

The Pet Thief is a dystopian fable of science, rebellion, humankind’s inhumanity, and the struggle for identity and survival in a post-human world.   When scientists, the government, and venture capitalists conspire to hybridize humans with animals—cats, specifically—for organ...

**The debut novel by Sarah Blackman (award-winning author of Mother Box and Other Tales) Hex explores the ways one woman uses language and stories to rebuild her own shattered sense of self. Alice is a motherless child, born to a motherless child, and raised with neither care nor grace....

A dark yet playful collection of short stories that pushes boundaries and blurs the lines between the real and surreal   Girl Zoo is an enthralling and sometimes unsettling collection of short stories that examines how women in society are confined by the limitations and expectations of pop culture,...

Stark and vibrant, the two halves of this sutured book expose the Frankenstein-like scars of the assemblage we call “human.”   In “Another Governess” a woman in a decaying manor tries to piece together her own story. In “The Least Blacksmith” a man cannot help but fail his...

On the surface a murder mystery—a detective’s search for the killer of five people in Denver—Expectation is also, among other things, a meditation on the relationship between language and music. In his newest novel, Jeffrey DeShell draws on the musical innovations of Arnold Schoenberg—by...

Normal0falsefalsefalseMicrosoftInternetExplorer4 *Arthouse *is an audacious transformation in prose of fourteen modernist films. From film to film, Jeffrey DeShell follows a forty-something failed film studies academic—The Professor. While The Professor is reinvented with each new chapter...

Imagine a bookish man named Francis D., swimming at a public beach in Cape Cod, who drifts out beyond his depth. Imagine that he doesn't drown, that the tide carries him to a private cove where he is rescued by two mysterious young women named Charlotte and Emily. Imagine then that Francis leaves...