Accomplished South Carolina storyteller George Singleton has been called "the unchallenged king of the comic southern short story" by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "a breakthrough writer you need to know" by Book magazine, and "a big-hearted evil genius who writes as if he were the love child of Alice Munro and Strom Thurman" by novelist Tony Earley. Singleton's third collection Why Dogs Chase Cars comprises fourteen uproarious short stories about Mendal Dawes, a young boy coming of age in the backwoods town of Forty-Five, South Carolina, and coming to terms with his eccentric but well-intentioned father. Singleton writes in an earnest and consistently comic voice as he skillfully navigates themes of race, class, family, and southern heritage. In his vision of the small-town South, where the "gene pool is] so shallow that it wouldn't take a Dr. Scholl's insert to keep one's sole dry," cynicism ultimately gives way to empathy and an understanding of the empowering ties that always bind one to home and family.
This Southern Revivals edition includes a new introduction by Singleton himself, as well as a previously unpublished story, "Poetry," and an expanded ending to "The Earth Rotates This Way," the final piece in the collection.