The Half-Mammals of Dixie [Paperback]

George Singleton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 8, 2003

This second collection of short stories by a bright star in Southern fiction showcases a town so tiny it missed the map, the gleefully off-the-wall Southerners who refuse to be pigeonholed, and a South far removed from big-city Atlanta and proper Charleston. As the author says of his characters, "They're regular people just trying to get by." Among them: a boy whose reputation is ruined when he appears in a head-lice documentary; a lovelorn father who woos his third-grader's teacher with creative show-and-tells; and a former pharmaceuticals salesman who waits for the word of God to tell him what to paint on next the "primitive" canvases he sells for big bucks to an art dealer.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

While it often seems true that every town in America has become depressingly alike, fully franchised and chain-stored to death, short story writer George Singleton offers a compelling rebuttal in his second collection, The Half-Mammals of Dixie. Almost all 15 of its stories are set in or around a fictional South Carolina town called Forty Five, and Singleton's eccentric characters--flea-market hustlers, a fish aquarium salesman, a bogus "primitive" artist--are hard to imagine outside the narrow civic boundaries of his singular imagination.

A writing teacher and ashtray-collecting, flea-market hound himself, Singleton builds most of his stories around first-person narrators, evoking such writers as Flannery O'Connor, Barry Hannah, and Raymond Carver, but infusing each tale with his own brand of sly humor and outsider skepticism. Singleton is particularly good at capturing the rhythms and peculiarities of southern speech, as in this passage from "When Children Count": "You sound exactly like my dead sister," this woman said, pushing her full cart into Tammy's backside. "I ain't never heard nothing like that. Say this: 'I will never, ever order a club sandwich here, what with the ptomaine.' Say it. Say."

While most of the stories are funny--"Richard Petty Accepts National Book Award" is an absolute marvel of conception and execution--a few of the tales that hit hardest are much darker. Especially haunting is "Bank of America," which centers around four childhood friends who still gather annually as adults in a swamp-land tree house, from which they fish for turtles and are forced, one fateful year, to confront the consequences of past misdeeds. Despite the story's title, which refers to a character who works at a national chain of banks, Singleton tells the story in a voice that's as unique as the flawed, but mostly likable, characters who populate his hometown. --Keith Moerer --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Singleton expands upon the peculiar conceits of his debut collection, These People Are Us, in these 15 offbeat stories. Set mostly around the little South Carolina backwater of Forty-Five, they take on everything from racism to alcoholism to head lice, with plenty of laughs along the way. A hapless father clumsily tries to use his nine-year-old son to win back his high-school sweetheart (now the boy's teacher) in "Show and Tell," sending him off to school with old love notes, corsages and jewelry he had given her and making the boy pass them off as precious antiques. Another father launches a one-man crusade against a racist newspaper deliverer in "Fossils." "What Slide Rules Can't Measure" details the bizarre lives of denizens of the flea market circuit, while the title story follows an aquarium salesman to a bizarre motivational seminar, where he meets a scarred woman who sells audio books to the blind. "This Itches, Y'all" features a boy who fled youthful ignominy as the star of an educational film on head lice, then returns to his 25th class reunion to find unexpected celebrity. As in the first volume, the narrators tend to be relatively sophisticated men (or boys) who find themselves surrounded by feckless "pallet-heads." Some may find the tone of intellectual superiority condescending, but it's usually tempered by self-deprecation, to wonderful comic effect.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 312 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (September 8, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156028581
• ISBN-13: 978-0156028585
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,309,286 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Feel the love and the loathing, June 6, 2006

By 

Adam Burton (New Ellenton, SC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Half-Mammals of Dixie (Hardcover)

This was the first collection of George's that I read, and I think it's still my favorite. The title intrigued me, then the author photo on the back flap sealed the deal(he's in a personal sauna, smoking and looking like he just made it through one hell of a bender). Fortunately for me, the satirical whimsy of both title and photo accurately reflected the prose gems found between the covers.

These stories are funny(sometimes uproariously so), they are wistful, they are damning, they are evocative. It is clear that while George is quick to lampoon the stupidities that rural southern life is so often steeped in, there is also an appreciation, an affection for the south that tempers his barbs.

Some reviewers have charged that this volume is uneven. I disagree; it is true that the stories are not funny from beginning to end, and that some are funnier than others, but I would also posit the notion that George's purpose in writing these stories is perhaps deeper than merely evoking amusement. He is not a one-trick pony, limited to the realm of belly-laughs.

As for those who were bored with this collection, might I suggest something a little more to your tastes? Something nice and two-dimensional from Patterson or Evanovich, maybe?

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fiction or Reality? In the South, it is Difficult to Tell, February 17, 2004

By 

Dr. Victor S. Alpher (Austin, Texas, U.S.A.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Half-Mammals of Dixie (Hardcover)

Fie, fie, what happened to my review? Down the Bayou Teche....so here we go again! It must have had something to do with those Half-Mammals or the Confederate in the Attic...

If you are a Southerner, this book will ring with truth, because Mr. Singleton's characters are so obviously around the block, if not next door. If you know that prosperity can be measured in the number of cars you have up on blocks in the FRONT yard, you're in the neighborhood. If you're afraid to get of I-95 between the Virginia border and Florida, or I-10 between the Louisiana border and Houston, this is the book for you. Or, if you took I-64 thinking you'd go through West Virginia and turned around where it ended (Fie, Senator Byrd!)...you need to get right with Dixie.

I could hardly recommend Mr. Singleton's stories higher--up with Confederates in the Attic (nonfiction), or Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (possibly fiction). His characters refer to Nietzche, get regular calls from the FBI and John Walsh, or play 20 questions as a marital ritual, or find themselves thinking about cosines, and sines for "no reason in particular." And, they tend to think of lead pipes for uses not related to who did what to whom in the drawing room. They have no clue, but they're right on.

I highly recommend you get into this book, and it compares in frankness with Walker Percy, without the I Went to Medical School in New York puttin' on airs. Regular folks, who know the difference between a live oak (you can look it up) and poison ivy, at least.

Yep, it ITCHES, y'all. Rather be a lying dog than a dog lyin'.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I think, therefore I think you're wrong., September 25, 2002

By 

Sean Nolan "I love a good story" (Greenville, SC United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Half-Mammals of Dixie (Hardcover)

A little more evolved than the first collection. George is definately establishing himself as one of America's premire short fiction writers!
If you loved the first ccollection, as much as I know you did, you have to get this one.