The Half-Mammals of Dixie

A BOOK MAGAZINE Best Short Story Collection of the Year

In a South far removed from big-city Atlanta and proper Charleston is a town so tiny it missed the map: Forty-Five, South Carolina. Here a boy's reputation is ruined forever when he stars in an educational documentary about head lice; a former pharmaceuticals salesman waits for the word of God to tell him what to paint; a single dad woos a teacher with the show-and-tell objects he sends to school with his son; and motivational speakers, aquarium salesmen, flea-market shoppers, and palm readers mingle with hilarious results.

Overlooked, underappreciated, and funnier than a potbellied pig on a leash, the residents of Forty-Five are utterly impossible to forget.

"Relentlessly offbeat . . . A disturbingly askew-at times, downright surreal-vision of the South."-Entertainment Weekly

"Singleton's voice comes off like that of a brilliant barfly, who occasionally suffers from the clairvoyance of madness."-The Times-Picayune (New Orleans)

"Sly, intelligent, hilarious."-The Charlotte Observer

George Singleton has been published in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Playboy, and Zoetrope. The author of the short-story collection These People Are Us, he teaches writing at South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities and lives in Pickens County, South Carolina.

This second collection of short stories by a bright star in Southern fiction showcases a town so tiny it missed the map, the gleefully off-the-wall Southerners who refuse to be pigeonholed, and a South far removed from big-city Atlanta and proper Charleston. As the author says of his characters, "They're regular people just trying to get by." Among them: a boy whose reputation is ruined when he appears in a head-lice documentary; a lovelorn father who woos his third-grader's teacher with creative show-and-tells; and a former pharmaceuticals salesman who waits for the word of God to tell him what to paint on next the "primitive" canvases he sells for big bucks to an art dealer.

Contents

Show-and-Tell

Fossils

This Itches, Y'all

When Children Count

How to Collect Fishing Lures

Answers

Public Relations

Bank of America

Deer Gone

Duke Power

Impurities

The Half-Mammals of Dixie

What Slide Rules Can't Measure

Page-a-Day

Richard Petty Accepts National BookAward