George Singleton

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 influence of Flannery O'Connor and Raymond Carver, at other times Barry Hannah and Donald Barthelme, and touch on the mysteries of childhood, the complexities of human relationships, and the absurdity of everyday life, with its inexorable defeats and small triumphs. Assembled here for the very first time, You Want More represents a body of work that showcases the incisive talent that earned George Singleton's place among "the great pillars of Southern literature." (New York Times)

Selected Stories of George Singleton

You Want More

As a boy growing up in the tiny backwater town of Forty-Five, South Carolina, all Mendal Dawes wants is out. It's not just his hometown that's hopeless. Mendal's father is just as bad. He buries stuff in the backyard--fake toxic barrels, imitation Burma Shave signs (Bird on a Wire, Bird on a Perch, Fly toward Heaven, First Baptist Church), yardstick collections. He calls Mendal "Fuzznuts." He makes him recite Marx and Durkheim daily and take terrible unpaid jobs helping out at nursing homes and tutoring little Shirley Ebo in reading.This funky, sometimes outrageous, and always very human book is about how the only son of a weirdo learns what a wizard his father really was--after it's too late. On the way to witnessing that understanding, we get to watch this duo's precarious relationship in a place with "a gene pool so shallow that it wouldn't take a Dr. Scholl's insert to keep one's soles dry."To be consistently funny is a great gift, but to be funny and cynical and empathetic all at the same time is George Singleton's special gift. As Candler Hunt of Olssons Books and Records, Washington D.C., has said, "This is not your mother's Southern fiction."

Tales of a Beleaguered Boyhood

Why Dogs Chase Cars

Half-Mammals of Dixie

The Curious Lives of Nonprofit Martyrs

J. Robert Lennon

Sam Lipsyte

Brian Evenson

Dean Bakopoulos

Christine Hume

Dan Pope

Kristin Prevallet

Highway 14

Jim Wilson

Scott Owens

Baynard Woods

Michael Knight

Chuck Jones

Shari Smith

Susan Cushman

Greg Herren

Wendy Reed

Judith Richards

Suzanne Hudson

Jennifer Horne

Jennifer Paddock

Chuck Cannon

Ed Southern

Joe Formichella

Lari White

Michael Reno Harrell

Bev Marshall

Marlin Barton

Janet Nodar

The first Shoe Burnin' occurred on a cold winter's night years ago in Alabama. When the firewood ran out, a box of old shoes provided the assembled group of friends and artists with the fuel they needed to stock the hearth and share stories and songs late into the night. The bond forged that night began a tradition of fireside Shoe Burnin's. Naturally, many of the stories and songs involved shoes -- the places they've been and the people who wore them. Now, for the first time, these works have been collected in The Shoe Burnin', Stories of Southern Soul. The hardcover book includes a companion CD of spoken word and music that captures the Southern soul.

Stories of Southern Soul

The Shoe Burnin'

A collection of stories by the author of The Half-Mammals of Dixie seeks to bring out the eccentricities of everyday life with such tales as a man's search for a black-market sonogram to replace a taped-over real one and a town's attempt to fake being hit by a tornado. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

Stories

These People Are Us

Presents a collection of short stories that captures the lives of such characters as a boy whose reputation is ruined forever after he stars in a documentary on diagnosing head lice and a lovelorn father who woos his child's third-grade teacher.

The Half-mammals of Dixie

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, but it is also as miserable as its name sounds. The inhabitants are miserable. Even people from as far away as New York who happen to stop by Gruel are miserable . . . Fortunately, the writing is good enough that the misery becomes somehow enjoyable.” —Booklist “George Singleton is a madman. He’s also one of the most talented American writers the South has turned out in decades.” —The Post and Courier

Drowning in Gruel

Josh Bayer

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