Saturday, January 20, 2024 – 5:00-6:30 PM EDT
Price: Free
Registration: Seating is limited; please call to reserve your spot: 843-379-7025.
Venue: Pat Conroy Literary Center | 601 Bladen St., Beaufort
Website: Facebook Event Page
The nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center will host an evening with visiting award-winning fiction writer Scott Gould, author of Idiot Men: Short Stories, in conversation with fellow award-winning writer Mindy Friddle, on Saturday, January 20, at 5:00 p.m., at the Conroy Center (601 Bladen St., Beaufort). Books will be available for sale and signing. Please call to reserve your seat in advance: 843-379-7025.
(Gould will also be teaching a fiction workshop, Write What You Know Well Enough to Lie About, from 2:00-4:00 p.m. at the Conroy Center that same day.
About Idiot Men
“Scott Gould is a literary shapeshifter. A rough Southern man who writes about trucks, beer, dogs and doublewides with the finesse of a poet. Idiot Men is like the best country song you have ever heard. His writing breaks your heart but makes you rejoice that you are still alive to recover.”–Jane Stern, author of Ambulance Girl
With Strangers to Temptation, Things that Crash, Things that Fly, and The Hammerhead Chronicles, Scott Gould cemented his reputation as one of the most inventive, distinctive voices of Southern literature. In his latest collection, Idiot Men, he once again gathers a cast of unforgettable characters in eleven stories chock full of exceptional storylines and hilarious writing.
You’ll meet a trucker driver whose wife flees to Jamaica with her lover, leaving him to babysit her hairless tomcat, Princess Di; a male nurse who discovers a trailer full of counterfeit NASCAR paraphernalia during a home health visit; an amateur arsonist sentenced to a year in a Smokey the Bear suit; a disgruntled roofer with a bad back and a meth-dealing twin brother… these are just a few of the idiot men you’ll encounter in a collection of stories that will appeal to readers who relish literature with a Southern flavor.
Gould’s Idiot Men provides the stage for wayward characters who make poor choices in life and love against a backdrop of elegant prose. These tales recalibrate morality and convention as readers will grow to love the characters despite-and perhaps because of-their flaws. These diverse, rich stories are ultimately connected by the spellbinding voice of a true Southern storyteller.
About Author Scott Gould
Scott Gould is the author of five books, including The Hammerhead Chronicles, winner of the Eric Hoffer Award for Fiction, and Things That Crash, Things That Fly, which won a 2022 Memoir Prize for Books. Other honors include a Next Generation Indie Book Award, an IPPY Award for Fiction, the Larry Brown Short Story Award and the S.C. Arts Commission Artist Fellowship in Prose. Gould’s latest book is the story collection, Idiot Men.
His work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, Pangyrus, New Ohio Review, Crazyhorse, Pithead Chapel, Vessel, Garden & Gun, and New Stories from the South, among others. He teaches at the S.C. Governor’s School for the Arts & Humanities in Greenville, S.C.
About Interviewer Mindy Friddle
Mindy Friddle is author of the novel, Secret Keepers, (winner of the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction). The Garden Angel, her first novel and SIBA bestseller, was selected for Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers.
The South Carolina Arts Commission awarded Mindy a prose fellowship, and she has twice won the state’s Fiction Prize. Mindy’s third novel, Her Best Self, will be published in May.
