Unintended Consequences is the 4th installment in Fondation’s “L.A. Stories” series. This new collection reveals with precision the way life can tangle good intentions and trip up even the most sure-footed pedestrians. These are compact city fables delivering an anti-moral, a humbling reminder to judge not. The book includes over 40 illustration by artist Kate Ruth.

“Fondation’s fiction is so far past noir that it’s almost surreal. What’s horrifying is that it’s not surreal; it’s real. Fondation is the author of three books of fiction…and each of these books is a small masterpiece…”
—Transfuge (France)

What they're saying about Fondation's L.A. Stories series:

Unintended Consequences

"[A] journalistic sensibility pervades not only the stories' plots but also their prose…this kind of writing results in a spare, oddly affecting beauty…"
—American Book Review

“In terms of craft, the sixty-five short-short stories in Unintended Consequences are superb examples of narrative compression, of finding decisive moments in fiction to develop characters in the least amount of space. Populated with gun-wielding bar mates, murderers, prostitutes, thugs, and homeless, these stories constitute an unflagging gaze at LA poverty and seediness. A street-wise tone, coupled with pleasantly jarring, borderline-surreal plot twists give Fondation’s narratives a pulpy feel, while his plain style makes him imminently readable.”
—Front Porch Journal

Fondation has, "…gathered together scrap material about the lives of the down-and-out, the despondent, the criminal and the poor, and has rendered their miserable quotidian lives so that Everyman might receive some belated attention. The result is that the sad and commonplace tale of a Greek chorus takes precedence over the tragedy of an Antigone or Oedipus."
—Rain Taxi

"Unintended Consequences stands as an unexpectedly delicious read. Larry Fondation speaks the language of those fallen from grace, fallen from societal norm, and those fallen from reading the mass marketed novels widely flung out to literary junkies by corporate America. "—Tony Rodriguez, East Bay Literary Examiner

"…by blending spare first-person monologues with brief distant third-person sketches, by including humor, sadness, hope, and most of all anger, Fondation has made Unintended Consequences an oil- and blood-soaked fabric of urban life…"—Sean Bernard, Small Press Reviews

Fish, Soap and Bonds

“Fondation’s book is a grand success. Poverty is part of our landscape, our literature, and Larry Fondation is its standard bearer.”
—The American Book Review

“Fondation [writes] in a concrete, tangible manner that is carefully structured and lyrical throughout.”
—Midwest Book Review

“… a novel that is sharp, economical, humane and capacious.”
—Canadian Stories

Common Criminals

“Seething with the energy of streets, bars and bedrooms, Los Angeles author Larry Fondation’s second book reads like collaboration among Elmore Leonard, Dennis Cooper and Eminem. [The] author may well be the best unknown writer in America.”
—Detroit Metro Times

Angry Nights

“Angry Nights…shimmers with a real heat.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“…Just when it seems L.A. might be dead in the literary world, writers like Fondation shed new light on this unreal metropolis.”
—Review of Contemporary Fiction

“Suresighted, angry and absolutely unapologetic, Angry Nights is a creatively constructed portrait of an unforgiving world.”
—Los Angeles Reader

About the Artist