The End is the Beginning

by Matt Briggs

I had seen the movies. I had read the books. I had dreamed of this moment, often. The Plague of Fur began, as such things do, with a faint smudge of peach fuzz. The fur, once invented, contained the capacity to grow and spread. Like all life, it wanted to make more of itself.Reality is played out anyway. The End is the Beginning is a collection of fifteen short stories. These stories have appeared in magazines such as The Wandering Hermit Review , Semantikon , Seattle Magazine , Slouch Magazine , Mississippi Mud , The Mississippi Review , The Jack Straw Anthology , The Clackamas Literary Review , First Intensity , The Raven Chronicles , Smokelong Quarterly , and The Steel City Review . They were also written and first read for a number of reading series including It s About Time, The Titlewave New Reading Series, A Leg to Stand on, the Brontësarous, -- an eighteen hour marathon reading about the Brontës -- The Red Sky Poetry Theater, and What the Heck Fest.

171 pages, paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Matt Briggs grew up in the Snoqualmie Valley, raised by working-class, counter-culture parents who cultivated and sold cannabis. Briggs has written two books set in rural Washington chronicling this life, The Remains of River Names and Shoot the Buffalo. Critic Ann Powers wrote of Briggs first book in the New York Times Book Review, "Briggs has captured the America that neither progressives nor family-value advocates want to think about, where bohemianism has degenerated into dangerous dropping out." Briggs has published a number of collection of stories, including The Moss Gatherers and The End is the Beginning. Of his stories, Jim Feast wrote in the American Book Review, "All of Briggs’s zigzagging stories are told with great attention to the details of lowbrow culture and the contours of the American Northwest."