Union Ave Books, in partnership with the Knoxville Writers Guild and the UTK English department, is proud to present an author event with Ron Rash and George Singleton.

This event will take place on October 5 at 7 pm at The Emporium in downtown Knoxville.

While this is a free event, we ask that you register for your spot AT THIS LINK.

About Ron Rash

RON RASH is the author of the PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times bestselling novel Serena, in addition to the critically acclaimed novels The Risen, Above the Waterfall, The Cove, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; five collections of poems; and seven collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, Nothing Gold Can Stay, a New York Times bestseller, Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award, and In the Valley. Three times the recipient of the O. Henry Prize, his books have been translated into seventeen languages. He teaches at Western Carolina University.

About THE CARETAKER:

It’s 1951 in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Blackburn Gant, his life irrevocably altered by a childhood case of polio, seems condemned to spend his life among the dead as the sole caretaker of a hilltop cemetery. It suits his withdrawn personality, and the inexplicable occurrences that happen from time to time rattle him less than interaction with the living. But when his best and only friend, the kind but impulsive Jacob Hampton, is conscripted to serve overseas, Blackburn is charged with caring for Jacob’s wife, Naomi, as well.

Sixteen-year-old Naomi Clarke is an outcast in Blowing Rock, an outsider, poor and uneducated, who works as a seasonal maid in the town’s most elegant hotel. When Naomi eloped with Jacob a few months after her arrival, the marriage scandalized the community, most of all his wealthy parents who disinherited him. Shunned by the townsfolk for their differences and equally fearful that Jacob may never come home, Blackburn and Naomi grow closer and closer until a shattering development derails numerous lives.

A tender examination of male friendship and rivalry as well as a riveting, page-turning novel of familial devotion, The Caretaker brilliantly depicts the human capacity for delusion and destruction all too often justified as acts of love.

About George Singleton:

George Singleton has published twelve books, including These People Are Us; The Half-Mammals of Dixie; Why Dogs Chase Cars; Novel; Drowning in Gruel; Work Shirts for Madmen; Pep Talks, Warnings, and Screeds; Stray Decorum; Between Wrecks; Calloustown; Staff Picks; You Want More: Selected Stories. He has also published over two hundred stories in magazines and journals like the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s One Story, Playboy, Georgia Review, Zoetrope, North American Review, Story, LitMag, Southern Review, Mid-American Review, Fiction International, The Quarterly, Carolina Quarterly, Agni, Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, Five Points, Black Warrior Review, Subtropics, Texas Review, and Glimmer Train. He lives in Spartanburg SC.

About 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.