Hub City Shorts: South Carolina

Hub City Shorts: South Carolina is the inaugural volume in a new series celebrating short fiction from across the American South, anchored by the archive of one essential Southern writer alongside six new stories from the state that shapes each edition.

This first collection opens with Dorothy Allison, drawing on her personal papers from years before Bastard Out of Carolina made her a National Book Award finalist—a young writer broke, cold, and hammering out letters on a typewriter, trying to answer what she wanted from her one life.

Alongside her sit new stories that range from the tender to the unsettling to the darkly comic: a piano lesson turns into power struggle, a daughter's monthly prison visits with a father learning Latin, a family war fought over cigarettes and horror movies, a Confederate flag flown by the one man determined to reclaim it, a library encounter that curdles into fever dream, a barroom confession about a father mistaken for Santa Claus, and a child's-eye account of a nameless mountain and the makeshift faith built around it.

Featuring Dorothy Allison's archival works with an introduction by Mesha Maren and photographs of the writer by Morgan Gwenwald, Hub City Shorts: South Carolina also includes new fiction from Percival Everett, Julia Elliott, April Ayers, Tracy Dawson, Miriam McEwen, Jason Ockert, and Nathan Poole.