I Blame Myself But Also You
It’s July now—does not seem possible. We’re drawing ever closer to the dreaded back-to-school, and I cannot stay on top of books. We have a new one coming out tomorrow. I just got the last of our copies of The Great Atlantic Highway1 in the mail finally, and now there’s a new book to mail out. Fortunately, Spencer Fleury is going to take on the labor since he’s signing copies of I Blame Myself But Also You, his new, and first, collection of stories.
One of the things I’m sort of proud of at Malarkey is we are not a star-chasing press2. We don’t care about a writer’s social media following or where a book fits into “the market.” All that matters is the words. And with Spencer Fleury, the words are good. You wouldn’t believe how long I thought about the first four sentences in this paragraph; I kept thinking, would I be happy if I had a book coming out and my editor implied in a substack post going out to 1,500 people that I wasn’t a star? That I don’t have twitter clout? Maybe not, I don’t know. All I know is I sat with Spencer’s stories, when I had to decide how many books we could get away with putting out this year, and I wanted them. I wanted to work on this book, and it was an immense pleasure. There were some characters I could sort of see myself in, others who reminded me of my family, others who were completely, pleasingly baffling to me. The stories swing from absurdity to bittersweet realism; the writing is lyrical and sharp. This is a good place for a blurb:
“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
Here’s my favorite story from the book. It’s called “Tube Man.”
Here’s another blurb:
“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
I want people to read this book. It’s good and it wants to be read, it deserves to be read. If you can’t afford to buy it but want to read it please feel free to email us at malarkeybooks@gmail.com and we will send you an ePub or PDF. Or even better, request it from you local library. It might be available for you on Libby/Overdrive tomorrow anyway, but you can also ask your library to order a print copy. It is extremely helpful and wonderful when people do this, so we enthusiastically, happily, vehemently encourage you to go for it. Here’s the ISBN: 979-8990324084.
And of course if you’d like to buy a copy there are ways! You can order a signed copy directly from us at our website, and Spencer will sign it and mail it from his spot in beautiful San Francisco. It’s also on sale on our website, and you’re welcome to take 25% more off with code BEACHREADS. You can also order from Asterism, Amazon, Bookshop, and B&N, and pretty much any place you can order books.
As ever, when you buy books from small presses, you’re keeping them alive, which is important, but more important is that you’re keeping literature alive. There’s been a lot of talk about a literacy crisis in the US, and people tend to narrow that down to issues of decoding and reading comprehension (both important, both real, serious problems that I come up against in the classroom) but for me the real literacy crisis is this: we are edging closer and closer to a return to a world where the rich know how to read and everyone else is expendable. There’s more I have to say on this, but not here, not today. And none of this is to say if you order Spencer Fleury’s book you will single-handedly save civilization and democracy—and yet, on the other hand, maybe you will?
—AG
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Making it sold out on our website, but it’s still available from Asterism, Amazon, Bookshop, and B&N.
I’ve had to choose a couple times now between taking on a project by a more well-known (in these indie lit/small press/outsider circles) writer or working on a book from a lesser-known writer, and (sorry, Joyce) I’ve picked the lesser-known writer. That doesn’t mean one book was necessarily better than the other, just that one connected with me more strongly. For me, selecting a book often comes down to intangible qualities; this is part of what makes writing rejection notes so difficult. I know it feels phony to read sorry we’re not publishing you’re book, but it’s not because it’s bad, and yet that’s usually the truth. When we get manuscripts sent to us, most of them are publishable. I say no to a lot of books I like or that I think are good or have potential. Anyway, going too far off on a tangent here.