RETELLING PATTERNS
OF VIOLENCE AND LOVE
Fondly, two novellas by Colin Winnette
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
March 6, 2013
MADISON, NJ — It seems that Colin Winnette may be the world’s most productive houseguest. When he stays a while with friends or family, he writes a book. Both of the novellas in Fondly (Atticus Books, $14.95, August 6, 2013) were written on trips away from home.
Gainesville was written to Fleetwood Mac’s song, “Honey Hi,” played on repeat 498 times while Colin visited his father one summer. It is a darkly whimsical tale of a Texas family bloodline from cradle to grave and back again. Entire lives span a small number of pages, and as each character grows they move in and out of the same confusing struggle between violence and love that troubled their ancestors.
As Colin puts it, “Both books deal with love, but love is a difficult thing to pin down. It means different things at different points in the books. It is a slippery feeling, however strong.”
In One Story, The Two Sisters was written while Colin visited a friend in Vermont. It recasts two characters into new worlds and surrealistic circumstances over and over again. In one story, one sister is blind and the other is in a wheelchair. Then they become two olives in a martini. Then they are transoceanic swimmers and mermaids and nuns. Then they have children. Then they share wings. Like the family in Gainesville, the sisters of In One Story regenerate and begin again.
An exploding head on the cover complements what Colin says about the book, “There is a lot about the creative impulse, what it means to make, to unmake.” In both novellas, characters are taken apart and reconfigured, wound and released to new settings. They murder, cry, beat, and deceive the ones they care for, but they also get second chances, either through their children or a new version of themselves. Illustrated by artist Scott Teplin, the drawings and the language of Fondly push far beyond conventional storytelling to depict family and love as they are rarely seen: utterly raw, mystical, and wholly dysfunctional.
Fondly arrives in bookstores August 6, 2013.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Colin Winnette is the author of two other books, Revelation, a novel available from Mutable Sound, and Animal Collection, a collection of short stories available from Spork Press. He was the recipient of the 2012 Sonora Review’s Short Fiction Award, and his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, The Believer, and Hobart, among others. Colin lives in San Francisco.
PAST PRAISE FOR PREVIOUS WORKS OF COLIN WINNETTE
For Revelation
In Revelation, Colin Winnette sets fire to the world, and in the aftermath, characters wander through smoke, struck dumb by devastation. A forceful book—stripped down, cool and painful—about the absolute peril of desire.
—BEN MARCUS, author of The Flame Alphabet and Notable American Women
Keep your eye on this Colin Winnette. He’s a gifted stylist, and quite often a funny one.
—ADAM LEVIN, author of Hot Pink and The Instructions
For Animal Collection
What I loved about this story was its swift blunt movement—how one paragraph would move to the next without much transition and great bits of info would get revealed along the way. The quickness allowed for an emotional punch that I found very effective and powerful.
—AIMEE BENDER, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake and The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
Part Wes-Anderson-on-Beckett dioramas, part echo-boomer on Kafka dramaturgy, each piece works to shatter ontological constructs of what is human and what is animal. The tiny sparks that fly off each, strangers and charms, make up Winnette’s trouble-wall called the human condition.
—JONI WALLACE, author of Blinking the Ephemeral Valentine
Atticus Books is a multimedia press that specializes in literary fiction. Atticus is run by founder and publisher Dan Cafaro and assistant editor Libby O’Neill. Visit us on the web at https://atticusbooks.net/.
Press Contact: Abby Hess
abbyh [at] atticusbooks [dot] net
570.419.1190