Description

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True to its name, Burning Down My Father’s House, comes at you like a house on fire. Michael Gills’s fourth collection of short fiction continues the saga of Joey Harvell, who’s from a people prone to impromptu fistfights on the sides of southern highways, where they drive semis hauling dead whales floating in beds of formaldehyde, after all, “this was the Dixie Circuit–it was nothing for a Peterbilt to pull off the interstate with a six-hundred-pound rat, two-headed goats or Donkey Woman nursing horsey-faced twins.” Murderous and grace-infused, these stories incinerate the family trials and tribulations that collect and go on collecting until they stack floor to ceiling under the carports of our lives. What’s left after the great conflagration is a matter of the heart, how we love, even when it’s impossible.

About the Author

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MICHAEL GILLS is the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction, including Finisterre, the second book of a two-part visionary memoir (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2021) and the novel West (RDSP, 2019), Book three of the Go Love Quartet. His short story collection The House Across from the Deaf School (Texas Review Press, 2016) won a Utah Book Prize. Other work has been awarded the Southern Humanities Review’s Theodore Hoefner Prize for Fiction, Southern Review’s Best Debut of the Year, recognition in the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize Anthology, and inclusion in New Stories from The South: The Year’s Best. His undergraduate novel writing workshop been featured in USA Today, and several of his students have gone on to publish books of their own. Gills is a Distinguished Honors Professor at the University of Utah.