Magic stops. Men vanish. Worlds end.

Life goes on.

The stories in The Last Vanishing Man begin with the end of the world, as a narrator seeks to imagine how the actions of a terrorist ripple through a family. The stories end with a new beginning for an expatriot American living in the melting tundra of Siberia, where all that had vanished now returns. In between, hard-edged realism lives alongside ghost stories and weird tales, lyrical tragedies skip into wild romps, characters of various genders and sexualities get scarred by the wounds of manhood, and bleak futures deliver terror and grace.

With a literary sensibility cut with existential horror, these are stories of characters tormented by unfulfilled desires and unfathomable violence—but also stories of compassion, of community, of humor, and of infinitely queer possibilities beyond the prison of the self.