Hello Down There

Michael Parker is the author of seven novels and three collections of stories. He has received four career-achievement awards: the Hobson Award for Arts and Letters, the North Carolina Award for Literature, the R. Hunt Parker Award, and the 2020 Thomas Wolfe Prize. The three-time winner of the O. Henry Prize, Parker has published short fiction and nonfiction in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Oxford American, Runner’s World, Men's Journal, and others. He taught for twenty-seven years in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and since 2009 he has been on the faculty of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.

“This is Southern gothic intrigue and eccentricity at its best, with language playing an integral part in the action. In Parker's intensely imaginative world, metaphor can be addictive, stories have the power to free stultified lives and telling the truth can redeem the sins of the past. Rich and compassionate, his is a memorable story.”—Publishers Weekly“Parker joins the ranks of outstanding Southern novelists with this well-written first novel, set in the early 1950s in fictional Trent, North Carolina, a small town with its old-moneyed families, sycophantic merchants, and dirt-poor working people. Parker's unusual but never gimmicky narrative style is well suited to a set of characters and a series of events worthy of Flannery O'Connor. A welcome debut; recommended for all fiction collections.”—Library Journal