Books from Fiction Attic Press
You already know that we publish flash fiction online every week, but if you like the printed word, you might also enjoy our flash fiction anthologies, debut novels, and story collections.
Return on Investment, a novel by Magdalena Waz
A wickedly smart, deceptively powerful novel about the uneasy intersection of love and commerce. Winner of the Fiction Attic Press Debut Novel Prize.
When recent grad Laura hires herself out as a human breast pump in Chicago, she is unprepared for the devotion she inspires in new moms desperate to be relieved of the machinery of lactation. Soon, the situation at her job goes sour, and she devises a plan to work less and earn more. A dreamer at best and a steamroller at worst, Laurie hopes to prove to the world that there is employment beyond the nine to five. Her imaginative scheme draws a young housekeeper, a male bachelorette party babysitter, and a data entry clerk into the business of manufactured intimacy–a business more dangerous than Laurie is willing to admit.
Sharp, darkly funny, and insightful, RETURN ON INVESTMENT will appeal to fans of Maria Semple, Jess Walter, Jami Attenberg, and Lena Dunham. A must-read for anyone who knows what it means to seek fulfillment through work and love.
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“Waz’s darkly comic first novel reads like the birth of a brand-new genre—call it literature of the dystopian present—wherein a lost generation of post-college twenty-somethings struggle against debt, doubt, the loneliness of a constantly-connected world, and an out-of-control gig economy . . . an audacious, ambitious debut.” –Joseph Bates, author of Tomorrowland: Stories
A coming-of-age tale unlike any I have ever read…Swiftly told, at turns hilarious and poignant, Return on Investment is worth every second you put into it. ~David McGlynn, author of A Door in the Ocean
In Return on Investment, Magdalena Waz brings to vivid life the mighty struggles and Millennial triumphs of a group of young Chicagoans graduating into the Great Recession. Waz’s writing is slyly ironic, her characters’ delightfully inappropriate first jobs…are shrewdly presented, and their stories are irresistible..superb. –Eric Goodman, author of Child of My Right Hand and Twelfth and Race
Winter in Tirana: The Stories of Jiri Kajane: Volume 1
Winter in Tirana: The Stories of Jiri Kajane, by Kevin Phelan and Bill U’Ren, brings together six intertwined tales of bittersweet love, absurd politics, and comic hijinks by the enigmatic Jiri Kajanë. Set against the final days of the Albanian empire, the stories follow an unnamed narrator–the Deputy Minister of Slogans–and his young friend Leni as they attempt to navigate a landscape of shifting political alliances and unsettling personal affairs. By turns funny, profound, and deeply moving, Winter in Tirane is an exploration of the meaning of identity, the power of suggestion, and the complex relationship between a story and its creator. Winter in Tirane presents a startlingly imaginative take on the notion of the author as fictive construct.
Some Pleasant Daydream: The Stories of Jiri Kajane, Volume 2
Some Pleasant Daydream: The Stories of Jiri Kajane, by Bill U’Ren and Kevin Phelan, takes up where Winter in Tirana leaves off. Enver Hoxja is dead, and so is Hansa Splite. The unnamed narrator, Albania's Deputy Minister of Slogans, has lost his true love, Ana, and is still trying to reshape his world without her. The forever optimistic Leni, faced with his own romantic and economic trials, has grand plans to turn their fortunes around. In these six stories, as funny as they are poignant, the two friends forge ahead with schemes that strike a fine balance between absurdity and practicality. In a final twist as strange as the Ministry of Slogans itself, Kajanë proves that a story, like a life, is as true as you make it.
Fiction Attic Press has been proud to publish the stories of Jiri Kajane since 2005. You can find one of the new, uncollected stories, Food for the People, here on Fiction Attic.
Flash in the Attic, Volumes 1 & 2
Flash in the Attic: 33 Very Short Stories features flash fiction from Steve Almond, Corey Mesler, Vanessa Hua, Ilana Stanger-Ross, Neal Allen,
, Bob Thurber, and others. Foreword by Michelle Richmond.Flash in the Attic 2: 44 Very Short Stories features flash fiction by Thaisa Frank, Susie Hara, Daniel Coshnear, and others. In this volume, you will find stories about the complexities of love and the nuances of marriage, stories about strange worlds and impossible places, stories about slippery identities and shifting alliances, stories both political and personal. And then there are those stories that, above all, make the normal seem strange or the strange seem normal.
Homing Instincts by Karen Guzman
winner of the Fiction Attic Press Debut Novel Contest
A story of loss, change and transcendence, Homing Instincts follows Seth Hingham, a young wildlife biologist, as he struggles to put his life back together after his news anchor girlfriend walks out on him and his much loved father dies.
Seth longs to retreat to the pristine woodlands of New England’s North Country, where he believes anonymity and solitude will heal his wounds. But a slow job market up North forces him to first make a detour to his Connecticut hometown.
Old ghosts pop up, as Seth’s cousin concocts a plan to honor the memory of a high school classmate killed in a long ago accident for which Seth has always felt responsible. At the same time, changing family dynamics in the wake of his father’s death are toppling the old status quo as Seth struggles to determine who he is and where he belongs. A chance at new love with a spirited, yet fragile, single mother further complicates the picture.
In Karen Guzman’s pitch perfect debut novel, the past holds Seth prisoner with exquisite power, keeping him frozen in time…This is a splendid book.” — Jacqueline Sheehan, New York Times Bestselling author of Lost and Found
Karen Guzman’s eye for detail and ear for the truth take us on a journey of redemption as Seth gingerly tests a new relationship and tries to put his troubled past into perspective. Homing Instincts wraps a complex contemporary tale in lyrical language and astute insights.” — Susan Schoenberger, author of A Watershed Year and The Virtues of Oxygen