In two artfully crafted novellas, Colin Winnette offers a sly and sinister portrayal of lineage and loss, and the roles we all play in writing our own family history. Written in a seamless, entrancing style, Gainesville follows the twisted branches of a restless family tree in a small Texas town. As tragedy strikes each generation in a slightly skewed fashion, what remains is the relentless passage of time toward an eerily familiar pattern. In One Story, The Two Sisters is woven from an array of beautifully haunting short stories. It details the lives of two sisters, both cast as wildly imaginative entities, each more bizarre than the next. Winnette joyfully plays with life forms as he presents the sisters as (1) an olive at the bottom of a dirty martini; (2) Shel Silverstein; (3) transoceanic swimmers, and so on. The result is an entertaining, skillful meditation on art, love, family, the creative impulse, and what can and cannot be communicated in a single story, or a single life.

Fondly

Literature & Fiction

Winnette, Colin

Literary

Atticus Books

“A witty and grisly gothic unlike anything I’ve ever read. You should absolutely read this.” ―Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble A new arrival at an isolated school for orphaned boys quickly comes to realize there is something wrong with his new home. He hears chilling whispers in the night, his troubled classmates are violent and hostile, and the Headmaster sends cryptic messages, begging his new charge to confess. As the new boy learns to survive on the edges of this impolite society, he starts to unravel a mystery at the school's dark heart. And that's when the corpses start turning up. A coming-of-age tale, a Gothic ghost story, and a murder mystery all in one, The Job of the Wasp is a bloodcurdling and brilliantly subversive novel about paranoia, love, and the nightmare of adolescence.

The Job of the Wasp: A Novel

United States

Soft Skull

Users: A Novel

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice\nMarrying the philosophical absurdities of life, technology, start-up culture, and family, Users is for readers of Ling Ma, Dave Eggers’s The Circle, and viewers of the hit Apple TV+ original series Severance\nMiles, a lead creative at a midsize virtual reality company known for its “original experiences,” has engineered a new product called The Ghost Lover. Wildly popular from the outset, the “game” is simple: a user’s simulated life is almost identical to their reality, except they’re haunted by the ghost of an ex-lover.\nHowever, when a shift in the company's strategic vision puts The Ghost Lover at the center of a platform-wide controversy, Miles becomes the target of user outrage, and starts receiving a series of anonymous death threats. Typed notes sealed in envelopes with no postage or return address, these persistent threats push Miles into a paranoid panic, blurring his own sense of reality, catalyzing the collapse of his career, his marriage, and his relationship with his children.\nThe once-promising road to success becomes a narrow set of choices for Miles, who, in a last ditch effort to save his job, pitches his masterpiece, a revolutionary device code-named the Egg, which will transform the company. The consequences for Miles seal him inside the walls of his life as what was once anxiety explodes into devastating absoluteness.\nIn a world rife with the unchecked power and ambition of tech, Users investigates—with both humor and creeping dread—how interpersonal experiences and private decisions influence the hasty developments that have the power to permanently alter the landscape of human experience.

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Fiction. A daughter disappears in the middle of the night. What happens in the aftermath of this tragedy—after the search is abandoned, after the TV crews move on to cover the latest horrific incident—is the story of COYOTE. There is a marriage and a detective. There is a storm, a talk show host, and a roasted boar. People are murdered and things are hidden. Coyotes skulk in the woods, a man stands by the fence, and a tale emerges within this familiar landscape of the violent unknown "COYOTE has a strong and inviting voice and that voice wraps around a dark story, a contemporary story, and one that has its own velocity and fragmentation built in. I found myself swept along in it and impacted by its delicate/bleak movement."—Aimee Bender "Winnette has a talent for conjuring characters and situations that exist purely to serve his work. These people are faceless with no discernible backstory, creating an unsettling alternate reality that we can dip into for 80 pages or so. The book leaves an impression not unlike a dream, as if you've just witnessed something troubling, but out of the corner of your eye or through the confounding texture of a sheer curtain."—Connor Ferguson "It's terrifying, intelligent, and will you leave you feeling uncomfortable about haircuts, barbecue, and home repair."—Andre Gray

Coyote

Contemporary

Les Figues Press

Colin Winnette makes use of the Western genre to stunning effect. ―Los Angeles Times
Brooke and Sugar are killers. Bird is the boy who mysteriously woke beside them while between towns. For miles, there is only desert and wilderness, and along the fringes, people.
The story follows the middling bounty hunters after they’ve been chased from town, and Bird, each in pursuit of their own sense of belonging and justice. It features gunfights, cannibalism, barroom piano, a transgender birth, a wagon train, a stampede, and the tenuous rise of the West's first one-armed gunslinger.
Haints Stay is a new Acid Western in the tradition of Rudolph Wurlitzer, Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, and Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man: meaning it is brutal, surreal, and possesses an unsettling humor.
"In his astonishing portrait of American violence, Haints Stay, Colin Winnette makes use of the Western genre to stunning effect. But this isn't a chummy oater penned by the likes of Zane Grey or Louis L'Amour. Winnette's frontier feels more Homeric. His knack for tapping into scenes of primal fear and poetic violence serves as an indictment of our species' base nature and worst instincts. While the novel flouts most of the conventions of the traditional horse opera, the rewards of Haints Stay belong to the reader." ―Los Angeles Times

Haints Stay

Two Dollar Radio

Gainesville

Long Day Press

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