There was a joint book signing for Will Allison's debut novel, What You Have Left (Free Press, $23.00), and Brad Vice's short-story collection, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train (River City Publishing, $16.95 softcover) at Burke's on Wednesday, June 20st, 5-7pm.
The former Flannery O’Connor Award-winning collection (famously pulped by the University of Georgia Press in 2005) is now resurrected. The nine original stories—praised in national reviews and by authors such as Brad Watson and Margot Livesey—are presented as they were originally intended and are augmented by two previously unpublished tales. Also included are an introductory essay by Vice, explaining for the first time his side of the controversy, and supplemental materials that provide context. Ultimately, however, readers will judge this book by its primary powers: the strength and integrity of the storytelling—vibrant, exciting, and, ultimately, original.
Brad Vice grew up in Alabama and has degrees in creative writing from both the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and The University of Cincinnati. His fiction has appeared in many magazines and journals including The Atlantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, The Greensboro Review, and Shenandoah. His story "Mojo Farmer" was anthologized in New Stories From the South, 1997 (Algonquin) and more recently his stories “Report from Junction” and "Chickensnake" were selected for inclusion New Stories from the South, 2003 (Algonquin) and Best New American Voices, 2003. (Harcourt). His reviews of contemporary fiction are regularly featured in the San Francisco Chronicle.
What You Have Left is an unforgettable story of love, loss, and, most of all, longing.
In 1976, on the day of his wife's funeral, Wylie Greer drops off his five-year-old daughter, Holly, at his father-in-law's dairy farm on the outskirts of Columbia, South Carolina. Wylie tells her he just needs a little time to clear his head, but thirty years pass before Holly sees her father again -- "time I spent wondering what I'd done to make him leave," she says, "and what I could do to make him come back."
What You Have Left is about a father and daughter trying to make their way back to one another across decades of uncertainty and ambivalence -- all the while hoping to discover that what they have left is worth salvaging. It's also the story of a grandfather bent on suicide, a pioneering female NASCAR driver, a heartbroken amnesiac, a video poker junkie, and assorted other liars, cheaters, and lovers who, despite their best intentions, never quite live up to their own expectations.
Are we doomed to repeat our parents' mistakes? Can lies save love instead of destroying it? Is letting go the same as giving up? Shot through with sly humor and a knowing sympathy for human weakness, What You Have Left takes up these and other questions as it examines the weight of history, the nature of loss, and the possibility of forgiveness. Making use of bold shifts in viewpoint and time, Allison proves a brilliant observer of the emotional legacies handed down from parent to child and the ways loss defines us. This stunning debut brims with an affection for humanity exactly as it is -- in all its ignorance and awareness, its swagger and humility, its despair and hope.
Will Allison was born in Columbia, South Carolina, and now lives in South Orange, New Jersey. The former executive editor of Story, He serves as a staff member at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. His stories have appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, Glimmer Train, One Story, Kenyon Review, and other magazines and have been shortlisted in The Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. He's currently at work on a second novel, also forthcoming from Free Press.
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