July 2024

A woman seeks out the meaning of an inscrutable note given to her by a man who used her car as an instrument of his own suicide. Two teenage boys discover that the devil has opened a record store in their seedy Florida suburb. A man’s obsession with living a minimalist life goes nowhere as the possessions he discards all seem to find their way back to him. 

The eleven stories in I Blame Myself But Also You (and other stories) are a little absurd, a little speculative, and a little dark. In them, Fleury repeatedly digs into a handful of universal themes: The search for that one existential totem we expect to fix everything, but that never quite does; the strange, unnerving liminal space between childhood and not-quite-adulthood; the endless struggle to find our place in the world, and the nagging fear that maybe we never will.

“The stories in Fleury’s collection are strange, unsettling, yet so firmly anchored in place that we can hear, see, smell, and almost touch these remarkable settings. Each story feels utterly familiar but also slightly shifted; they’re sharp gems and I wanted to read twenty more of them.”

—Amber Sparks