I Blame Myself But Also You and other stories
“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
“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
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.
“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
These stories are a little absurd, a little speculative, and a little dark. They repeatedly dig 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.
Get it straight from Malarkey Books.
Or get it from Asterism, Bookshop, B&N, or Amazon.
Read “Tube Man,” a story from the collection.
Read what the Independent Book Review
thought of I Blame Myself But Also You and other stories.
Listen to the author discuss the book on the Salt Lake Dirt podcast.
… and on This Podcast Will Change Your Life.
… and on Teaching Learning Leading K-12.
Coming in 2026: The Shitbird
Seaman Apprentice Colin McAllister’s luck just went from bad to garbage fire.
Of all the sailors on the Coast Guard cutter Stargazer, why did he have to be the one to discover the dead body of well-liked Petty Officer Fred Sobel? McAllister has enough problems already: he’s a stoner with a bad attitude, no friends, and a smart mouth. He’s what the Stargazer’s old-timers call a shitbird, and on this ship, shitbirds often find themselves on the wrong side of a beatdown.
When his shipmates decide to get justice for Fred the old-fashioned way—by tossing McAllister overboard in the dead of night—only the intervention of Fred’s closest friend, the popular and respected Wade Lucas, keeps them at bay. But soon, others begin planting doubts in Lucas’s mind, and McAllister quickly finds himself in a tricky spot. All he wants is to finish the patrol and make it home in one piece, but if he’s not careful, he could end up dead like Fred—and he might even take the whole crew down with him.
Part noir, part Bildungsroman, part dark comedy, The Shitbird will be published in late summer 2026 by Stanchion Books.
More details as they become available …
Also by Spencer Fleury: How I’m Spending My Afterlife
“As fast-paced as it is fun, packed with quick dialogue and quicker hijinks. Spencer Fleury is a writer to watch.”
—Michelle Richmond, NYT bestselling author of The Wonder Test
“A breakneck dissection of truth, lies, and the trouble in between.”
—Stephanie Hayes, author of Obitchuary
“A dark, comic debut.”
—Eryk Pruitt, author of What We Reckon
“Reading How I’m Spending My Afterlife is like watching a train wreck—in the best possible sense. As Alton Carver makes one ill-advised decision after another, it’s impossible not to keep turning the pages. Alton’s spectacular bad judgment—and Fleury’s sharp prose—are obsessively compelling.”
—Janis Cooke Newman, author of A Master Plan For Rescue
“Spencer Fleury manages a fantastic balance between a wild, wicked plot and well-rendered characters who earn our sympathy, even as they wallow in the muck of their own bad behavior. This book is hard to put down.”
—James Brubaker, author of The Taxidermist’s Catalog
“How I’m Spending My Afterlife starts out of the gate at an all-out sprint, hooking us by the end of the first paragraph and luring us relentlessly forward with sharp, propulsive prose. Fleury’s deft pacing raises the stakes and ratchets up the tension with every twist and turn, and his knack for balancing poignant reflection with dark, side-splitting humor is undeniably top-notch. Add to that an authentic, engaging narrative voice, and what you have is memorable debut novel that’s a hell of a good time and not to be missed.”
—William R. Soldan, author of In Just The Right Light
“Contains about a thousand more ‘fuck‘s than I would have included.”
—Bob Fleury, co-creator of Spencer Fleury
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