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Starred review from July 27, 2020
Singleton (Calloustown) brings together his best work along with one new story in this smashing collection that combines satire, tragicomic premises, and small-town South Carolina locales. Items as innocuous as caulk or a VHS tape become the focus of droll yet moving meditations on the foibles of modern life or the misery of a marriage’s disintegration. Dogs are as ever-present as bumbling, misfit divorced men spouting barnyard humor. Hilarious character studies, Singleton’s crowning achievement, shine in such stories as “Show-and-Tell,” in which a single father clumsily attempts to woo his son’s teacher, who also happens to be his original high school sweetheart; or the hapless husband who records “Bonanza” over his wife’s sonogram, then attempts to find a substitute tape from a local barfly; or the former child actor in “This Itches, Y’all” who is haunted by an instructional film he’d starred in about head lice. The college professor who fools everyone by teaching a semester of “The Novels of Raymond Carver,” despite the author having never written one, also delights. The charismatic dialogue consistently adds depth and identity to the characters (“I said, ‘Are you a drinking man, Mr. Mack Morris Murray? Let’s you and me go inside and partake of some schnapps I got holed up for a special occasion. I like your style, man’”). Fans and newcomers alike will rejoice in reading these highlights from a Southern literary master.

Starred review from July 15, 2020
Thirty hilarious stories, mostly set in small-town South Carolina, gathered from eight collections published over the last two decades. As Tom Franklin notes in his introduction, Singleton's stories often proceed from simple, spectacular premises, the kind easily conveyed in a sentence. "Outlaw Head and Tail" features a bouncer--well, a "pre-bouncer"--who accidentally records an episode of Bonanaza over his wife's sonogram and then canvasses barflies in search of a substitute tape; in "Show-and-Tell," a divorced father pursues his high school girlfriend, now his son's third grade teacher, by proxy, sending his boy to school with great love letters of literature during show and tell, mementos like a dried-up wrist corsage and matching boutonniere, etc. "Probate" tells of a couple's misadventures with a heartbroken and gabby "traveling euthanasia vet"; the hero of "This Itches, Y'All" is a man shadowed all his life by his three words of dialogue in a hygiene filmstrip about head lice; "Staff Picks" tells a love story about a librarian and a professional bowler who meet while trying to win an RV by keeping a hand on it for as long as possible. These stories have absurdist energy, wit, and inventiveness to burn, but antic comedy is their mode and m�tier, not their sole aim or reason for being. Singleton's work doesn't wear literariness on its sleeve; even when he channels canonical writers, as in "John Cheever, Rest in Peace," he does so in a way that's literal and can seem almost anti-literary--making the grandly metaphorical, life-spanning "The Swimmer" into a story in which a man suffers a heart attack on his riding mower and then, dead, cuts a gently arcing swath across his town before crashing into a silo. But these stories are often sneakily ambitious, sneakily moving. Singleton has Charles Portis' gift for writing a satire both ruthless and lined always with affection, and like that Southern icon, he's a master of and evangelist for the joys and idiosyncrasies of speech, especially the loquacious talk of barrooms and Little League fields and scrapbooking shops. For the uninitiated, a wonderful introduction to a Southern original.

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