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Hub City Shorts: Mississippi is the second volume in a new series celebrating short fiction from across the American South, pairing the archive of one essential Southern writer with six new stories from the state that shapes each edition.
This one opens with Larry Brown, drawing on his personal papers from years before he became one of the writers who redrew the map of what Southern fiction could sound like—firefighter writing at night at a card table between shifts, filling manila envelopes with stories and mailing them out to rejection after rejection.
Alongside him sit new stories that move from the wry to the devastating: a spurned professor who takes up archery against his frat-boy neighbors, a woman managing OCD while her overfamiliar landlord circles closer, a group-home worker doling out pills to foster children she can't quite bring herself to name, a long-haul trucker forced into one more run he swore he was done with, and an unexpected visitor who shows up on a carport uninvited and won't leave.
Featuring Larry Brown's archival materials with an introduction by Mesha Maren and photographs by Tom Rankin, Hub City Shorts: Mississippi also includes fiction from Jesmyn WArd, Mary Miller, Olivia Claire Friedman, Max Hipp, Chelsea Hogue, and Shane Brown—Brown's own son, whose story closes the collection.
Mesha Maren is the author of the novels Sugar Run, Perpetual West, and Shae. Her short stories and essays can be read in Tin House, The Oxford American, The Guardian, Triquarterly, The Southern Review, Ecotone and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor of the Practice of English at Duke University. She currently resides in Durham, NC.
M. Randal O’Wain is the author of Meander Belt: family, loss, and coming of age in the working-class south (Nebraska, 2019) and the story collection Hallelujah Station (Autumn House, 2020). His essays and stories have appeared in Masters Review, Zone 3, Hotel Amerika, Guernica, and Oxford American. He holds an MFA from Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program and teaches at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He currently resides in Durham, NC.
Larry Brown (archival) Introduction by Mesha Maren
Max Hipp — “Splendid Isolation”
Olivia Clare Friedman — “Lock, Lock, Lock”
Chelsea Hogue — “The Big World Versus the Little World”
Mary Miller — “Big Bad Love”
Photos by Tom Rankin
Jesmyn Ward — “Cattlehaul”
Shane Brown — “George”