Ryan Boudinot

A tour de force novel from the “wickedly talented” (Boston Globe) and “darkly funny” author of Misconception (The New York Times Book Review). It is the Afterlife. The end of the world is a distant, distorted memory called “the Age of Fucked Up Shit.” A sentient glacier has wiped out most of North America. Medical care is supplied by open-source nanotechnology, and human nervous systems can be hacked. Abby Fogg is a film archivist with a niggling feeling that her life is not really her own. She may be right. Al Skinner is a former mercenary for the Boeing Army, who’s been dragging his war baggage behind him for nearly a century. Woo-jin Kan is a virtuoso dishwasher with the Hotel and Restaurant Management Olympics medals to prove it. Over them all hovers a mysterious man named Dirk Bickle, who sends all these characters to a full-scale replica of Manhattan under construction in Puget Sound. An ambitious novel that writes large the hopes and anxieties of our time—climate change, social strife, the depersonalization of the digital age—Blueprints of the Afterlife will establish Ryan Boudinot as an exceptional novelist of great daring. “Duct-tape yourself to the front of this roller coaster and enjoy the ride.” —The New York Times “Challenging, messy and funny fiction for readers looking for something way beyond space operas and swordplay.” —Kirkus Reviews “The absurdities are cleverly crafted and highly entertaining. Imaginative [and] heartfelt.” —Hannah Calkins, Shelf Awareness “Ingenious . . . Frenzied, hilarious, and paranoid . . . A bracing dystopian romp through contemporary dread.” —Publishers Weekly “Probably the strangest post-apocalyptic novel in ages.” —io9 “What an inspired mindfuck of a book!” —Baltimore City Paper

A Novel

Blueprints of the Afterlife

Cedar Rivers has come to upstate New York, to help Kat Daniels, by vetting her memoir, an account of the summer they were sweethearts.

A Memoir Novel

Misconception

This is a collection of literary prose short fiction―stories about the end of Bert and Ernie’s relationship, about robot love, a town who shares a heart, and much more―from an up-and-coming Seattle author. Man, I had so many stab wounds, it was crazy. There I was at the conference center, and I hadn’t even adequately prepared my presentation. And so begins “Bleeding Man and Wounded Deer,” one of the stories in this collection of literary short fiction from the pen of acclaimed Seattle novelist Ryan Boudinot. Bouncing between experimental fiction, absurdist farce, paranoid futurism, and stinging satire, Boudinot’s funny, inventive prose lays bare the hopes and anxieties of our age. From a heartbreaking and pitch-perfect account of the end of Bert and Ernie’s relationship, to a story about lovelorn robots looking for a “chop-shop owner who’s willing to look the other way” in a world where robot sex is illegal, to a Miyazaki-esque story about an entire town that shares the same heart, Boudinot’s prose crackles an acerbic wit. Also featuring: “Chopsticks” (the protaganist’s cat who develops a hard drug problem); “An Essay and a Story about Mötley Crüe” (wish-fulfillment disguised as memoir); “I Used to Be a Plastic Bottle!”; and “The Guy Who Kept Meeting Himself.”

The Octopus Rises

A debut collection of short fiction exploring the surreal banalities and weird outrages of everyday American life includes the title story, "The Littlest Hitler," in which a nine-year-old boy devises a Halloween costume that will make him the scariest kid in the fourth grade. Reprint.

Stories

The Littlest Hitler

David Barringer

Dan Kennedy

Lee Klein

Pasha Malla

Arthur Bradford

Susannah Breslin

Andrew Bomback

Elizabeth Ellen

Susan Townsend

John Leary

Dennis Dillingham

Pia Ehrhardt

Shauna McKenna

Damon Stewart

The third print issue by both literary journals - Hobart and Monkeybicycle - it features full issues by each in a flip-cover double-issue style. Hobart features stories by Andrew Bomback, Pia Ehrhardt, Elizabeth Ellen and John Leary and artwork by Andrew Feuk. Monkeybicycle features stories by David Barringer, Ryan Boudinot, Susannah Breslin, Dan Kennedy and an exquisite corpse by Arthur Bradford, Ed Page, Whitney Pastorek Shya Scanlon, Steven Seighman and Claire Zulkey.

Hobart/Monkeybicycle #3

This bookish history of Seattle includes essays, history and personal stories from such literary luminaries as Frances McCue, Tom Robbins, Garth Stein, Rebecca Brown, Jonathan Evison, Tree Swenson, Jim Lynch, and Sonora Jha among many others. Timed with Seattle's bid to become the second US city to receive the UNESCO designation as a City of Literature, this deeply textured anthology pays homage to the literary riches of Seattle. Strongly grounded in place, funny, moving, and illuminating, it lends itself both to a close reading and to casual browsing, as it tells the story of books, reading, writing, and publishing in one of the nation's most literary cities.

Reflections from a Community of Writers

Seattle City of Literature

Virtual reality and artificial intelligence are already changing what it means to be an artist, an entrepreneur, and a human. In this appropriately strange and delightful book, Ryan Boudinot charts the course of this cultural shift through essays, musings, and even leadership principles. The world will be different by the time you finish reading it, and so will you. This visionary essay collection will teach you how to engineer a renaissance, it will provide new terms and concepts for thinking about collaboration and narrative in VR, it will show you the shape of reality to come, and how you can affect that shape. Drawing on the rise of grunge and the ascendance of Amazon, Boudinot unpacks and clarifies what's really at stake in our current media revolution and springboards from there into the far future, where perhaps artificial intelligence will take the spore of human life and spread it to the stars.

The Shape of Reality to Come

A debut collection of short fiction exploring the surreal banalities and weird outrages of everyday American life includes the title story, "The Littlest Hitler," in which a nine-year-old boy devises a Halloween costume that will make him the scariest kid in the fourth grade.

Ryan Boudinot

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