A Concordance of One's Life

A Concordance of One’s Life is Jim Nelson’s first collection of short fiction. Featuring ten stories (some previously published in magazines such as North American Review, Watchword, Confrontation, and more), Jim Nelson introduces you to a unique and unforgettable menagerie:


* A young man indexes his memoirs into a concordance, creating a media sensation as millions of readers jockey to decode his unpublished life story.

* Follow the careful plans of one man as he constructs his new girlfriend from scraps of photos collected off the Internet.

* A shortwave radio threatens to demolish a South Pacific island culture’s traditions.

* Two Americans in a sleepy Mediterranean seaside town witness a bizarre annual ritual.

* A professional obituary writer’s last request: to have his own obituary published upon his death.


Jim Nelson brings to you these worlds and more in A Concordance of One’s Life, a collection of ten short stories that ride the fine edge of what’s possible and what lays just beyond, all while remaining intensely personal, quietly human, and deftly enjoyable.



“Featuring passages of spiraling dialogue and vivid visual descriptions, Nelson’s tongue-in-cheek narrative about literary tourism begs to be turned into a sculpture or play.” - SF Weekly



“‘A Concordance of One’s Life’…lends itself quite easily to artistic interpretation because, in many ways, it’s about a struggle to find meaning.” - San Francisco Chronicle