With his signature darkly acerbic and sharp-witted humor, George Singleton has built a reputation as one of the most astute and wise observers of the South. Now Tom Franklin introduces this master of the form with a compilation of acclaimed and prize-winning short fiction spanning twenty years and eight collections, including stories originally published in outlets like the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Playboy, the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, and many more. These stories bear the influence of Flannery O'Connor and Raymond Carver, at other times Barry Hannah and Donald Barthelme, and touch on the mysteries of childhood, the complexities of human relationships, and the absurdity of everyday life, with its inexorable defeats and small triumphs. Assembled here for the very first time, You Want More represents a body of work that showcases the incisive talent that earned George Singleton's place among "the great pillars of Southern literature." (New York Times)

Celebrated Southern author George Singleton delivers a new collection of short fiction, brilliant and absurd, for fans of George Saunders and Tom FranklinA restaurant owner runs into trouble when his wife starts a well-intentioned, poorly named rooster rescue. A boy navigates his parents' split between a stretched phone cord and a flooded septic tank. A drunk sequestered in the middle of nowhere wakes up to find a tractor parked in his driveway. And in a big Cadillac, a grandfather and a grandson and a wayward dog hit the road, searching for a life not downloadable, nor measured in bandwidth.Loosely linked by characters and themes, The Curious Lives of Nonprofit Martyrs follows shysters and schemers, film buffs and future ornithologists, unlikely do-gooders, and the men who make up Veterans Against Guns in North America, all doing the best they can with what they possess in smarts and cunning. With Singleton's signature comic flair, these stories peer through...

These fourteen funny stories tell the tale of a beleaguered boyhood down home where the dogs still run loose. As a boy growing up in the tiny backwater town of Forty-Five, South Carolina (where everybody is pretty much one beer short of a six-pack), all Mendal Dawes wants is out.It's not just his hometown that's hopeless. Mendal's father is just as bad. Embarrassing his son to death nearly every day, Mr. Dawes is a parenting guide's bad example. He buries stuff in the backyard—fake toxic barrels, imitation Burma Shave signs (BIRD ON A WIRE, BIRD ON A PERCH, FLY TOWARD HEAVEN, FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH), yardstick collections. He calls Mendal "Fuzznuts" and makes him recite Marx and Durkheim daily and befriend a classmate rumored to have head lice.Mendal Dawes is a boy itching to get out of town, to take the high road and leave the South and his dingbat dad far behind—just like those car-chasing dogs.But bottom line, this funky, sometimes outrageous, and...

Set in the town of Gruel, South Carolina, this first novel by George Singleton, master of the comic short story, is the tale of a young man named Novel (his brother's name is James; his sister's is Joyce), a professional snake handler who stumbles across strange doings while he sits in a motel room writing his autobiography. As he struggles to recount his life story, he uncovers-and finds himself starring in-a decades-old town secret, one that can blow him and his fellow citizens sky-high. Funny as only George Singleton can be, full of Southern mischief and wit, Novel is a crazed and crazy fictional whirlwind of drinking, motel-living, art-forgery-committing, pool-playing redneck charm.

Calloustown, the seventh collection from master raconteur George Singleton, who's been praised by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as the “unchallenged king of the comic Southern short story," finds the author at the absolute top of his game as he traces the unlikely inhabitants of the titular Calloustown in all their humanity. Whether exploring family, religion, politics or the true meaning of home, these stories range from deeply affecting to wildly absurd and back again, all in the blink of an eye.

There's a place just down the way where a trip to the salvage yard reveals infidelity and theft. There's another where an unlicensed entomologist celebrates his freedom with a compulsive liar while a manhunt ensues on the streets outside. Places where a con man and his nephew sell stolen parachutes to veterans in case the ground beneath them should suddenly give way and where Chuck Norris's face graces only the walls of the finest trailers. A place where tongues get left in rental cars and a place where everyone insists an absolute stranger is your boyhood friend.Between Wrecks takes readers on a raucous bar crawl through an America both startlingly familiar and hilariously absurd, examining paranoia, fear, relentless "truths," longstanding personal habits gone awry, and what it means to look toward a horizon that may or may not be a mirage.

Acclaimed short-story master George Singleton follows the lives and schemes of the citizens of fictitious Gruel, South Carolina, in search of glory, seclusion, money, revenge, and a meaningful existence. In these nineteen tales, young Gruelites learn lessons when confronted with neighbors who might not be as blind as they appear, dermatologists intent on eradicating birthmarks, and fathers prone to driving on half-inflated tires in order to flirt with cashiers. Meanwhile, the town's older citizens try to make sense out of dogs that heal wounds, lawn-mowing dead men, wives who don't appreciate gas masks for Valentine's Day, and children who mix their mother's ashes with housepaint. Hilarious and tragic, George Singleton's unforgettable characters try to overcome their limitations as best they can.