Come See the Sideshow!

My colleagues at the Lit Blog Co-Op have been busy promoting the first of our three Read This! finalists for the fall quarter and it's a book definitely worth checking out.

Sidney Thompson's Sideshow, published River City, brings together an odd assortment of misfits from the South. Yeah, I know... the last thing we need is another eccentric cast of Southerners. But Thompson manages to give these oddballs a grace and humanity that is all too lacking when writers typically trot out the crazy-aunt-in-the-attic stereotypes.

Barry Hannah blurbed the book and said, "Thompson's wonderful stories prove that often the best way through to the meaningful anarchies of this world is classical restraint. It's beautiful to see the short story hanging tough as a bright form beneath Thompson's hands." George Singleton also weighed in and said, "Unlike a county fair's sideshow wherein viewers get a salacious peek for five minutes then return to the relative safety of an outside world, Thompson's characters linger closer to the reader than a noon shadow."

And of course, the collection does contain The Romanticist and the Classicist, the short story accepted for publication by The Atlantic Monthly only to be rejected after the editors learned Thompson's race. It's a story that has been called "incredibly creepy in tone and execution, and just strange enough to be plausible."

Sideshow is an intriguing collection. Be sure to check it out, or if you want to learn more, swing by the LBC website as we'll be chatting about it all week.