The Curious Lives of Nonprofit Martyrs

Celebrated Southern author George Singleton delivers a new collection of short fiction, brilliant and absurd, for fans of George Saunders and Tom Franklin

A restaurant owner runs into trouble when his wife starts a well-intentioned, poorly named rooster rescue. A boy navigates his parents’ split between a stretched phone cord and a flooded septic tank. A drunk sequestered in the middle of nowhere wakes up to find a tractor parked in his driveway. And in a big Cadillac, a grandfather and a grandson and a wayward dog hit the road, searching for a life not downloadable, nor measured in bandwidth.

Loosely linked by characters and themes, The Curious Lives of Nonprofit Martyrs follows shysters and schemers, film buffs and future ornithologists, unlikely do-gooders, and the men who make up Veterans Against Guns in North America, all doing the best they can with what they possess in smarts and cunning. With Singleton’s signature comic flair, these stories peer through the peepholes of small-town South Carolina into the lives of everyday martyrs—prodigal sons, wayward fathers, and all those who are a little of each.



Genre: Literary Fiction

"Please know that it is against my nature to fling the word 'genius' around like a sandlot football. I've used it maybe five times, and in all of those instances I applied it to composers, partly because I don't understand how they do what they do. Being a fiction writer, I understand all too well how we do what we do. But George Singleton is a genius, because he repeatedly manages to make me laugh, often uproariously, when my first impulse is to cry. How he accomplishes this feat is as mysterious to me as the twelve-tone music of, say, Arnold Schoenberg. But I know this: contemporary American literature - and I daresay the country itself - would be more vibrant if we had more writers like him. George Singleton is something perhaps even rarer than a genius. He's a treasure." - Steve Yarbrough