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We live in a world that abounds with all manner of material things. Unfortunately, while the most lovingly crafted objects are still esteemed and cherished - the original canvas, the handbound volume - materiality has often been disparaged because of its association with less lovely things, and an anti-sensual suspicion of the physical has elevated the value of the spiritual. But what if the distinction between materiality and spirituality wer...

In 1910, the famed escapologist Harry Houdini made an ill-fated attempt to become the first person to fly an aircraft over Australian soil-yet while Houdini is remembered today for his failure, the true record-holder has been forgotten. Now this quirk of history becomes fodder for the obsessions of one Bernard Cripp, the world-weary scion of an ailing family circus, as he tries to unearth every detail of Houdini's flight in order to re-enact...

Unemployed, lonesome, abandoned by his lover, an obscure artist on the verge of despair begins to question the worth of his craft-until, without warning, he lands the opportunity of a lifetime. Courted by a wealthy patron with enigmatic motives, he yields his talents to corporate interests. In theory, his brief is to sell his soul-to mastermind a publicity campaign for a line of products designed to enhance human perception. In practice, thoug...

American democracy is on its knees. The upcoming election could well be the last and the nation is braced for internal conflict. Meanwhile, on urban patrol, a nightwatchman discovers the latest in a series of prostitutes beaten and left for dead by a mysterious assailant. Meanwhile, his research into his family's past leads him to Sri Lanka under colonialism, with all its echoes of factional divisions and authoritarian rule. Meanwhile, h...

A restless woman upends her world, abandoning her domestic inertia to seek refuge in a foreign hemisphere. Purposefully unsettled on the labyrinthine streets of London, she assembles a new routine amid the afterglow of a story from a century earlier. A traumatised widow, doubly bereaved, threw herself into the icy Thames. A shell-shocked soldier, heading home from war, gave himself to the depths to save her. Now disoriented by slippages in tim...

In the murky aftermath of a breakdown, a man still at odds with himself takes flight to a cottage in rural Norfolk. There he intends to strip his life of everything trivial, everything superfluous, paring it all back to the essential truths, values, and experiences. In doing so, he keeps a fragmentary journal: not a record of progress as such, but sporadic notes on his new surroundings as he attends to minor changes in search of an ideal momen...

In the murky aftermath of a breakdown, a man still at odds with himself takes flight to a cottage in rural Norfolk. There he intends to strip his life of everything trivial, everything superfluous, paring it all back to the essential truths, values, and experiences. In doing so, he keeps a fragmentary journal: not a record of progress as such, but sporadic notes on his new surroundings as he attends to minor changes in search of an ideal momen...

In the midst of a brutal winter, a man commits an unspeakable crime. A decade after the fact, the fallout is pieced together by another man who was once a friend of the perpetrator. But as the free man tells the prisoner's story, his words become marked by his efforts to do justice to all of the people whose lives have been touched by this singular event-and his search for a means of imaginative sympathy that might rescue the victim from her d...

A man becomes obsessed with expanding his body, putting on weight and enlarging himself until he swallows his surroundings. Another man is imprisoned by his own reflection, a reflection that spawns countless new reflections without end. And while one man consumes the disembodied essence of his siblings, experiencing memories that aren't actually his, others lose their wives to imaginary gods or grieve the collapse of families that don't even e...

Before dawn one day in midwinter, a man in flight from a crisis returns to a city he lived in long ago. He has lost everything-his home, his security, his sense of self-and now he sets off on foot through the streets as he prepares to knock on the door of an old friend, to swallow his pride and ask for a place to stay. But something unnameable interferes with his plans. He takes a turn around a corner. Then he turns again, and again, and again...

Meet Jean des Esseintes: reclusive, diseased, the last scion of an outmoded aristocratic family. He is also an unapologetic aesthete, prone to overwhelmingly intense sensory experiences in the presence of art. As he finds himself ever more enervated by the illness that consumes him, des Esseintes turns his back on wider society - a society he loathes - and retreats "upwards into dream, seeking refuge in illusions of extravagant fantasy." The r...

In 1790, Xavier de Maistre was sentenced to forty-two days under house arrest for his participation in a duel. Bored and frustrated, but unwilling to let domestic confinement wreak havoc on his sanity, de Maistre decided to look at his prison with fresh eyes. What he saw was a world of unexpected wonder, a world as full of marvels as any distant land.

A restless woman upends her world, abandoning her domestic inertia to seek refuge in a foreign hemisphere. Purposefully unsettled on the labyrinthine streets of London, she assembles a new routine amid the afterglow of a story from a century earlier. A traumatised widow, doubly bereaved, threw herself into the icy Thames. A shell-shocked soldier, heading home from war, gave himself to the depths to save her. Now disoriented by slippages in tim...

In 2018-2019, Splice published three collections of stories-Dana Diehl's Our Dreams Might Align, Michael Conley's Flare and Falter, and Thomas Chadwick's Above the Fat-each of which, in its own distinctive way, unwove the veil between reality and the irreal. Now, in this first anthology from Splice, the authors of those collections come together with new work and new affinities, each one paired up with a new author of their choice whose fictio...

A beloved child is lost: taken too soon or never born. A woman bereaved and a man distraught are pulled apart, isolated, abandoned to search for intimacy elsewhere. A heartfelt bond is broken: a romance collapses under conflicting desires, a marriage cannot bear the burden of the unsaid. Lives dissolve, identities wither, and yet, amidst it all, there are glimmers of grace: compassion, renewal, second chances, serenity.The stories of Deirdre S...

At the top of a high-rise tower, buffeted by a gale, a desperate man clings onto a ledge and feels the passing minutes drag out into eternity. In a city swallowed by rising floodwaters, two friends embark on a leisurely stroll while the surging waves lick at their heels. A struggling entrepreneur stakes his future years on a plantation of trees that won't reach maturity for a decade, a browbeaten bachelor stews over a lifetime's disappointment...

Is it possible for an experience of literature to be an experience of life? Can we think of words as existing in three dimensions, as things we move through, in much the same way that we move through the world? And how can we account for their effects beyond the page as we carry them with us, in our bodies, in our selves, holding on to them over the course of our years? In Between the Word and the World, Anna MacDonald sets out on an eloquent ...

Can a relationship survive on one person's love for a beard? Can Shakespeare protect a doomed romance from an angry bee stuck in a car? How does an old iron speak to affairs of the heart? And how can we gauge the secret yearnings of the woman who writes novels about werewolves?Wry and absurd, pithy and profound, the short fiction of Greg Gerke takes the pulse of couples arriving at the end of something, lovers entering the "unendurable zone." ...

What does it mean today to experience a work of art? In a culture of triviality and cynicism, at the mercy of the superfluous and ephemeral, where can we turn to find the genuine, the sincere, the truly accomplished?The thirty essays in See What I See are the fruits of a lifetime spent grappling with these questions. By turns lyrical and arch, nostalgic and impassioned, they seek answers in the achievements of the masters as well as in less li...

How many ways can the world fall apart? A smug superhero belittles the very people he's supposed to save. An Aztec god escapes the sacking of his city to take refuge in modern-day Manchester. Rebels topple a despotic regime, much to the disappointment of the dictator's body double, and even the penguins decide to rise up against their human captors.Welcome to the unforgettable worlds of Michael Conley: horrific, hilarious, and forever on the b...