In Conversation with Scott Gould and Jessica Handler | Whereabouts

Join us for a virtual conversation with award-winning authors Scott Gould and Jessica Handler on October 22nd at 7PM! Gould is the Hub City Press author of Strangers to Temptation, and Handler is the Hub City Press author of The Magnetic Girl. They will be discussing Scott Gould's newest book, Whereabouts, and answering your questions!

Register Here in Crowdcast!

Whereabouts

by Scott Gould

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Set in the deep South of the 1970s, Whereabouts is the powerful coming-of-age story of an independent teenager who desperately longs to flee her small, claustrophobic hometown following the unexpected death of her father and her mother's sudden remarriage to the local funeral director.

As she attempts to map a new course for her young life, Missy's search is constantly derailed by the men she encounters-the mortician stepfather with a penchant for chilly women, a much older third cousin who offers to drive her aimlessly in his dusty pickup (for a steep, perhaps tragic price), the quirky owner of an all-but-abandoned roadside motel, and a pair of mismatched AWOL Marines from Parris Island.

From cheap campgrounds to roadside bars, to the cracked Formica counter of a crumbling pancake house, Missy Belue wanders the back roads of a forgotten South, looking for a safe place to land, earning fresh scar tissue from the confusing, complicated world outside her hometown. In Whereabouts, award-winning writer Scott Gould lyrically weaves a tale of escape and redemption and, ultimately, of how love somehow survives, no matter the twisting paths it travels.

Scott Gould's previous book, Strangers to Temptation--a linked story collection the Atlanta Journal Constitution called a compulsive read and Foreword Reviews dubbed funny, often poignant, and not easily forgotten--was published by Hub City Press in 2017. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Kenyon Review, New Stories from the South, Black Warrior Review, Carolina Quarterly, Pithead Chapel, Garden & Gun, New Ohio Review, The Bitter Southerner, and Crazyhorse among others. He is a two-time winner of the SC Arts Commission's Individual Artist Fellowship in Prose and the SC Academy of Authors Fiction Fellowship. He lives in Sans Souci, South Carolina and teaches creative writing at the SC Governor's School for the Arts & Humanities.

Jessica Handler is the author of the novel The Magnetic Girl, winner of the 2020 Southern Book Prize, an Indie Next pick, Wall Street Journal Spring 2019 pick, Bitter Southerner Summer 2019 pick, and a SIBA Okra Pick. Her memoir, Invisible Sisters, was named one of the “Twenty Five Books All Georgians Should Read,” and her craft guide Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss was praised by Vanity Fair magazine. Her writing has appeared on NPR, in Tin House, Drunken Boat, The Bitter Southerner, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Newsweek, The Washington Post, Electric Lit, and More Magazine. She teaches creative writing at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, and lectures internationally on writing.