“Wounded Boarders” by George Singleton

South Carolina writer George Singleton’s new short story collection Wounded Boarders (Dzanc Books 2026) introduces us to a motley crew of distinctly Southern characters. Eclectic, vulnerable, and often not entirely likable, they find themselves working unusual and sporadic jobs, in strange and sometimes absurd settings, and dealing with equally unusual interlocutors.

Opening story “Horace Poor, Horace Mint” features Drew, an aimless young man on the cusp of adulthood who with the help of a metal detector unearths a small fortune in buried coins, only to lose it all in legal fees when he’s caught driving drunk. Then there’s Mitchell Mitchell, a hook-handed veteran and shuffleboard fanatic in the title story “Wounded Boarders” who, with his patched-together band of fellow amputees, defends his new neighbor against a stalker from the town dump.

In “Badges,” two adult siblings haggle over bric-a-brac while clearing out their deceased parents’ home. A girl scout sash reminds one sibling of her youth; the other recalls when their father, a man of a violent nature who suffered frequent painful injuries, once used the sash as a makeshift sling.

Most of Singleton’s characters seem resigned to their middling morality and their odd, complicated existences. They are the kind of fringe characters and situations you’d recount to your friends over beers, though they seem unlikely to be the friends themselves.

“I know I ramble. You can call me a rambler,” writes tarp-dealer Renfro Ware in a letter to his estranged daughter Nancy in “I Know About Childproofing,” the book’s longest and perhaps meatiest story. Renfro recounts in his letters how he and Nancy’s mother courted: in a van, traveling across the country competing in—of all things—trivia contests.

Singleton is himself a master of trivia. He populates his characters’ lives with random objects and situations that are, in fact, imbued with meaning; through stream-of-consciousness enumerations and seeming non-sequiturs he elevates this eclecticism, finding a lyrical quality in the absurdity of his characters’ lives.

A few details repeat, linking the stories ever so slightly. There’s more than one pole vaulter, for instance, and we meet numerous enrollees (or would-be enrollees) at the same fictional Southern college.

But the connections are not strong enough to obscure Singleton’s themes of whimsy, and the beauty of unique and unusual life circumstances.

He seems to assert that life is ultimately fruitless—that perhaps all that’s left in the end, after a person’s worth of sins and takings is tallied, is a really good story. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

George Singleton

George Singleton has published eleven collections of stories, two novels, a book of writing advice, and a collection of essays. His stories have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Playboy, the Georgia Review, Story, One Story, the Southern Review, Agni, Zoetrope, Epoch, Oxford American, Subtropics, and elsewhere. His non-fiction has appeared in Garden and Gun, Oxford American, Bark, Best American Food Writing, and elsewhere. He’s received a Guggenheim, the Corrington Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He’s a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Singleton lives in Spartanburg SC.