“Fleury knows how to burrow into this peculiar business called being alive. These are stories that make you love them.”

—Joshua Mohr, author of Model Citizen

Available from Asterism, Amazon, Bookshop, B&N

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, author of And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges

“In the tradition of short story writers like George Saunders and Aimee Bender, Spencer Fleury has in this sparkling collection created an alternate literary universe that surprises, delights, and encourages us to recognize the absurd in the everyday.”

—Janis Cooke-Newman, author of A Master Plan for Rescue