Take a darkly hilarious trip through a South Carolina town with the "unchallenged king of the comic Southern short story" ( The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)."Usually stories about small, quirky, southern towns are full of adorable, quirky characters that share their unusual philosophies with us and teach us how to enjoy life (think Forrest Gump or even Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil). Gruel may be small, southern, and quirky, bu...

A comprehensive guide to South Carolina writers who have made significant contributions to the state's literary traditionThe South Carolina Encyclopedia Guide to South Carolina Writers expands the range of writers included in the landmark South Carolina Encyclopedia. This guide updates the entries on writers featured in the original encyclopedia and augments that list substantially with dozens of new essays on additional authors from the late eigh...

Witty and surprising, George Singleton’s latest short fiction collection welcomes both new and longtime readers with his signature offbeat humor, perfect for fans of George Saunders and Jill McCorkleA seasoned house flipper befriends a club of hook-handed, shuffleboard-playing war veterans to deter a potential stalker. A couple in a middle-of-nowhere ghost town quells their boredom by luring would-be robbers to their house. A former yearbook photographer enacts rev...

A quirky tale of a hard-drinking artist by an author who "writes about the rural South without sentimentality . . . but with plenty of sharp-witted humor" (NPR Morning Edition).Renegade artist Harp Spillman is lower than a bow-legged fire ant. Because of an unhealthy relationship with the bottle, he's ruined his reputation as one of the South's preeminent commissioned metal sculptors. And his desperate turn to ice sculpting might've led to a posse of angry...

"George Singleton is a very funny man. He could write about a tootsie roll and keep me reading," says Abigail Thomas, author of Safekeeping and A Three Dog Life, about Singleton's new collection of personal essays.Readers of his celebrated short story collections (The Half-Mammals of Dixie, You Want More, and The Curious Lives of Non-Profit Martyrs, among others) know just what a master storyteller Singleton can be. Yet in this collectio...

A story collection that's "Relentlessly offbeat . . . A disturbingly askew-at times, downright surreal-vision of the South" ( Entertainment Weekly ).A Book Magazine Best Short Story Collection of the YearGeorge Singleton, who's had many stories published in the best literary journals, burst into the big time with appearances in Playboy, Zoet...

Celebrated Southern author George Singleton delivers a new collection of short fiction, brilliant and absurd, for fans of George Saunders and Tom FranklinA restaurant owner runs into trouble when his wife starts a well-intentioned, poorly named rooster rescue. A boy navigates his parents’ split between a stretched phone cord and a flooded septic tank. A drunk sequestered in the middle of nowhere wakes up to find a tractor parked in his driveway. And in a big Cadill...

These fourteen funny stories tell the tale of a beleaguered boyhood down home where the dogs still run loose. As a boy growing up in the tiny backwater town of Forty-Five, South Carolina (where everybody is pretty much one beer short of a six-pack), all Mendal Dawes wants is out.It's not just his hometown that's hopeless. Mendal's father is just as bad. Embarrassing his son to death nearly every day, Mr. Dawes is a parenting guide's bad example. He buries stuff in the backy...

Set in the town of Gruel, South Carolina, this first novel by George Singleton, master of the comic short story, is the tale of a young man named Novel (his brother's name is James; his sister's is Joyce), a professional snake handler who stumbles across strange doings while he sits in a motel room writing his autobiography. As he struggles to recount his life story, he uncovers-and finds himself starring in-a decades-old town secret, one that can blow him and his fellow citizens sky-high....

With his signature darkly acerbic and sharp-witted humor, George Singleton has built a reputation as one of the most astute and wise observers of the South. Now Tom Franklin introduces this master of the form with a compilation of acclaimed and prize-winning short fiction spanning twenty years and eight collections, including stories originally published in outlets like the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Playboy, the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, and many more. These stories bear the i...

"A bouncer videotapes an episode of Bonanza over his wife's sonogram and scrambles to find a replacement, an ex-poet takes a job driving a van that provides mammograms, and an office-supply salesman falls for a woman from an all-girl wrestling revue in a town called Kingdom Come in George Singleton's These People Are Us."--Publishers Weekly

My dog Tapeworm Johnson needed legitimate veterinary attention. It had been two years since she received annual shots. I read somewhere that an older dog can overdose on all these vaccinations, and I have found—I share this information with every dog owner I meet—that if you keep your pet away from rabid foxes, raccoons, skunks, bats, and people whose eyes rotate crazy in their sockets, then the chances of your own dog foaming at the mouth diminishes drastically. I also believe that do...