Expecting Goodness & Other Stories

When renowned fiction editor C. Michael Curtis moved from Boston to Spartanburg to accept a distinguished chair at Wofford College, he assumed he'd be far from a literary center. But Curtis, long-time fiction editor of The Atlantic magazine and self-professed "habitual anthologist," found himself in a pocket of extraordinary writers. The venerable literary editor's exploration of his new city has led to the publication of Expecting Goodness, a collection of twenty Southern short stories by both established and up-and-coming authors who remarkably share the same hometown.

The title story by Michel S. Stone transpires in an airport as a hesitant young husband begins his journey toward an adopted child. In Rosa Shand’s heartbreaking “Sweetness,” a fifteen-year-old Charleston girl discovers her mother’s lesbian love affair (“I knew we were all in hell,” she says.). Two teenage boys looking for a good time encounter a deadbeat, aging Jack Kerouac in Deno Trakas’s “Pretty Pitiful God.”

There’s levity in this collection too: in Lou Dischler’s offbeat “Lola’s Prayer,” a file clerk believes she has lost a pregnant chinchilla up the tailpipe of her Toyota.

Among the other authors are Thomas McConnell, author of the story collection A Picture Book of Hell (Texas Tech University Press); National Public Radio producer Thomas Pierce, Susan Tekulve, whose collection My Mother’s War Stories received the Winnow Press fiction prize; and Elizabeth Cox, author of A Slow Moon (Random House, 2001). Expect goodness from all of them.