Inheritance

Inheritance marks the entry of novelist Janette Turner Hospital into the world of South Carolina story. Hospital, who serves as distinguished writer-in-residence at the University of South Carolina, selected these stories from more than 200 winners in 17 years of the statewide creative writing contest.

"These stories reveal a complex world," she writes in the introduction of Inheritance, "a world full of slippage and bewilderment, where the old binary oppositions between southerner and non-southerner, urban and rural, safe and unsafe no longer apply."

The authors represent an extraordinarily diverse cross-section of the state's literary community. Some are full-time writers or teachers; others find time during law careers or engineering jobs to produce their art. They live in small towns like Clemson and Ravenel; resorts areas like Hilton Head and Camden; and major cities like Columbia and Spartanburg.

Inheritance is a collaboration between the South Carolina Arts Commission and Spartanburg's Hub City Writers Project. The Fiction Project has been co-sponsored by the Charleston Post & Courier since 1993 and by The State newspaper prior to that.