Fat Man and Little Boy

Two bombs over Japan. Two shells. One called Little Boy, one called Fat Man. Three days apart. The one implicit in the other. Brothers.

In this remarkable debut novel, the atomic bombs dropped on Japan are personified as Fat Man and Little Boy. This small measure of humanity is a cruelty the bombs must suffer. Given life from death, the brothers' journey is one of surreal and unsettling discovery, transforming these symbols of mass destruction into beacons of longing and hope.

"Only someone with the deftness of heart of a writer like Mike Meginnis could redefine the war novel into something like Fat Man and Little Boy, a book which translates our basic world of never-ending terror into a highly nuanced and inventive diorama available absolutely nowhere else."?Blake Butler, author of Scorch Atlas and There is No Year

"Beguiling, strange, and strangely lovely, Fat Man and Little Boy is a deeply sorrowful yet mysteriously empowering debut."?Patrick deWitt, author of The Sisters Brothers

"Mike Meginnis is my favorite kind of writer?extraordinarily inventive, formally curious, profoundly moving?and his Fat Man and Little Boy is a debut of impressive ambition, a reinvention of the historical novel, an existential thriller powered by the booming engines of history, the atom, the human heart." ?Matt Bell, author of In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods

"In Fat Man and Little Boy, Mike Meginnis takes the mother of all atrocities and makes it strange, sizable, turns it so sideways that we're forced to notice, to take heed. This alone is an achievement, but it's the way he does it that dazzles?with gorgeous, careful prose that gives us human failings and a desperate longing for connection so vividly rendered that we have no choice but drink it in, to reckon once again with this disaster in our own time and way."?Amber Sparks, author of The Desert Places and May We Shed These Human Bodies

"In this auspicious debut novel, Mike Meginnis charts a course for two itinerant brother bombs, Fat Man and Little Boy, with a wild and tender fabulist historical imagination. Among the many things I admire here is the overwhelming sense of language's displacement of history: Fat Man and Little Boy, made of flesh and bone, who exploded when they were born.... This is language and literary form grappling with atrocity?and finally delivering us from it. It is difficult to imagine a more humane task for writing."?Evan Lavender-Smith, author of Avatar

"Fat Man and Little Boy doesn't at all feel like a debut novel. Mike Meginnis writes like an old pro, entirely in control and in charge of this strange and haunted world. His prose is tight as hell, yet powerful, poignant and poetic."?Robert Lopez, author of Asunder and Kamby Bolongo Mean River

Mike Meginnis has published stories in Best American Short Stories 2012, The Collagist, PANK, and many others. He contributes regularly to HTML Giant and Kill Screen, and plays collaborative text adventures at exitsare.com. He earned his MFA at New Mexico State University, where he served as a managing editor of Puerto del Sol for two years. He now lives and works in Iowa City, where he operates Uncanny Valley Press with his wife, Tracy Rae Bowling. He has never seen the ocean.