Buxton Books is honored to host an in-store conversation with Scott Gould and Bret Lott for Gould’s new book The Hammerhead Chronicles.
About The Hammerhead Chronicles
On the day Claude slaps down a credit card for an expensive racing bicycle, his soon-to-be-ex-wife passes away. As Claude begins a quest to pedal away from his marriage and his grief, we encounter the Southern eccentrics that orbit his world: his overly independent, rebellious teenage daughter; his foul-mouthed sister-in-law who deftly stalks her husband's mistress; twin, gay bookstore owners who serve the profitable underground Confederacy market out of their "special" back room; the math professor possessing an attic full of rats and a penchant for revenge; a skinny bartender-named for a Marine base-who preaches a suck-it-up philosophy; and Claude's recently deceased wife, observing it all from the Great Beyond, where she is annoyed by the lack of decent weather and by the troubled, tangled lives she left behind.
This ensemble of quirky, narrative voices dovetail for a fast-moving, comic story of longing and redemption, while flipping a number of Southern clichés on their ears.
About Scott Gould
Scott Gould is the author of the memoir Things That Crash, Things That Fly, the novels, Whereabouts and The Hammerhead Chronicles, as well as the story collection, Strangers to Temptation. He is a multiple winner of the S.C. Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship in Prose and a recipient of the S.C. Academy of Authors Fiction Fellowship. Other honors include a 2022 Memoir Prize for Books, an Independent Press Award, an IPPY Award for Southern Fiction and the Larry Brown Short Story Award. His work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, New Madrid Journal, New Ohio Review, Crazyhorse, Pithead Chapel, BULL, Garden & Gun, New Stories from the South, and others. He lives in Sans Souci, South Carolina.
About Bret Lott:
Bret Lott is the author of fourteen books, most recently the essay collection Letters and Life: On Being a Writer, On Being a Christian (Crossway, 2013) and the novel Dead Low Tide (Random House, 2012). He received his MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1984, studying under Jay Neugeboren and James Baldwin.
From 1986 to 2004 he was writer-in-residence and professor of English at The College of Charleston, leaving to take the position of editor and director of the journal The Southern Review at Louisiana State University. Three years later, in the fall of 2007, he returned to The College of Charleston and the job he most loves: teaching.
He serves as Nonfiction Editor of Crazyhorse, has spoken on Flannery O'Connor at the White House, and served as Fulbright Senior American Scholar to Bar-llan University in Tel Aviv, Israel. From 2006 to 2013 he served as a member of the National Council on the Arts. He is also director of the Spoleto Summer Study Abroad program in English at the College.