The End is the Beginning

Final State Press, 2008

Paperback $14.95 | eBook (PDF) $2.50
will be published on September 1st.
Available now from Lulu.com.

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 Brontes -- The Red Sky Poetry Theater, and What the Heck Fest.

Some Stories Online:

• Trestle in SmokeLong
• Tiger in a LifeBoat in Semantikon
• My Gruesome Death in The Steel City Review
• Edgar in Slouch Magazine
• Trap in The Mississippi Review

Reviews of Matt Briggs' Stories

As accurate as Briggs' realistic settings are, it is this amorphous something else seeping through his new book that makes it seem so Northwest to me. These are stories about different kinds of misplacement, like the sense you get after you have come west to the end of the country and know there is nowhere further left to go.
— Rebecca Brown, author of The Terrible Girls, Annie Oaklies Girl, and The Children's Crusade

Briggs’ enormous and uncommon talent is for crafting fiction technically bold and psychologically daring, highly styled and deeply human. — The Stranger

Dodging the picturesque, postcard version of our region, the Northwest Briggs brings to his readers is at once stark and lush. — The Seattle Times