Surreal South edited by Pinckney and Laura Benedict
Cover art by Adela Leibowitz
Release date: October 15
ISBN: 978-0-9793049-7-2
Paperback, 380 pp.
Welcome to the Surreal South, the dream of the nation within the nation, the world within the world, shadowed by all the unmitigated horrors and illuminated by all the dubious glories of its distant and ill-remembered past, a puzzle, a slightly gruesome enticement, a boundless ambiguity, an enduring paradox, and an endless source of myth.
This inaugural issue contains dream stories, horror stories, monster stories, insanity, magical realism, the distorted, the peculiar, the impossible, the irrational.
Contributors include Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Olen Butler, Ron Rash, Tom Franklin, Ann Pancake, Chris Offutt, Beth Ann Fennelly, Katie Estill, Jacinda Townsend, Greg Johnson, George Singleton, Lee K. Abbott, Julianna Baggott, Brad Vice, Benjamin Percy, Kyle Minor, William Gay, Dean Paschal, Daniel Woodrell, Pinckney Benedict, Laura Benedict, Rodney Jones, Jon Tribble, Andrew Hudgins, Joy Beshears Hagy, Susan Woodring, and Kathy Conner.
PINCKNEY BENEDICT grew up on his family’s farm in Greenbrier County, West Virginia. He has published two collections of short fiction and a novel. His stories have appeared in, among other magazines and anthologies, Esquire, Zoetrope All-Story, the O. Henry Award series, the New Stories from the South series, Ontario Review, the Pushcart Prize series, and The Oxford Book of American Short Stories. He is the recipient, among other prizes, of a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Literary Fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts, a Michener Fellowship from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, and Britain’s Steinbeck Award. He is a professor in the English Department at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois.
