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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 McEven, Jason Ockert, and Nathan Poole.
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.
Dorothy Allison archival works and photos introduction by Mesha Maren
The Way You Must Play Always by April Ayers
Breakage by Tracy Dawson
All the Other Demons by Julia Elliott
The Appropriation of Culture by Percival Everett
Some Bloody Corner of the Public Library by Miriam McEwen
The Story of Bill Bull by Jason Ockert
Fox Mountain by Nathan Poole