The Last Vanishing Man and Other Stories

""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