Last Vanishing Man and Other Stories

Matthew Cheney’s debut collection of fiction, Blood: Stories, won the Hudson Prize and was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2016. His academic book Modernist Crisis and the Pedagogy of Form: Woolf, Delany, and Coetzee at the Limits of Fiction was published by Bloomsbury in 2020. About That Life: Barry Lopez and the Art of Community will be published by Punctum Books in the Fall of 2022. He is Assistant Professor and Director of Interdisciplinary Studies at Plymouth State University. His work has been published by Conjunctions, Woolf Studies Annual, One Story, English Journal, Weird Tales, Strange Horizons, Best Gay Stories 2016, Literary Hub, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He is the former series editor for the Best American Fantasy anthologies, and the co-editor, with Eric Schaller, of the occasional online magazine The Revelator.

"In my humble opinion, the best collection of 2023 was Matthew Cheney’s remarkable The Last Vanishing Man and Other Stories. It’s an assured, carefully composed collection that tends toward the grim and horrific but, importantly, is never an exercise in bleakness. Instead, Cheney’s clear-eyed, immersive prose provides a fascinating insight into obsession, violence, and loneliness. This is a collection that deserves award recogni­tion." — Ian Mond, Locus Magazine "Matthew Cheney’s most recent book, The Last Vanishing Man  is first-rate! I can't—as they say—recommend it highly enough." — Samuel R. Delany, Four time Nebula Award, two time Hugo Award, winning author and Science Fiction Hall of Fame inductee"Weird, dark, and wonderful visions and hallucinations from a wholly unique voice." —Jeffrey Ford, World Fantasy, Nebula, Edgar, and Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of A Natural History of Hell“Brutal and beautiful.” —Franz Nicolay, musician The Hold Steady and author of The Humorless Ladies of Border Control and Someone Should Pay for Your Pain"While grim and sad, the stories in The Last Vanishing Man are anything but an exercise in misery. There is a genuine beauty in Cheney’s clear-eyed prose, which immerses you in his world, even if the subject matter is challenging." —Ian Mond, Locus“A combination of wildly post-apocalyptic brutalism and deeply sympathetic studies of people—lost or irreparably harmed by modern life and the punishing ways masculinity is often shaped....By the end of this collection, we can easily answer those questions 'Who is to blame, though, for destruction? Who is to blame for life?—we are, of course, every one of us.”—Yvonne C. Garrett, Brooklyn Rail

• I.After the End of the End of the World 5 The Last Vanishing Man 21 Winnipesaukee Darling 38 II.Killing Fairies 57 Hunger 82 Mass 99 III.At the Edge of the Forest 123 Wild Longing 147 A Suicide Gun 173 IV.The Ballad Of Jimmy And Myra 204 Patrimony 217 On the Government of the Living 228 A Liberation 234 The Box 252 Publication History 253