Click here for a photo of Allan Gurganus.

Allan Gurganus Presents the Latest Collection of New Stories from the South
On UNC-TV's North Carolina Bookwatch,
Friday, September 1, at 9:30 PM, and Sunday, September 3, at 5 PM

In the twenty-first year of the heralded New Stories from the Southseries, the book welcomes a new editor-author Allan Gurganus.  For the latest collection, Gurganus combed through hundreds of short stories written in 2005 to assemble a muscular array of talent, twenty stories ranging from low-down, high-octane farce to dark, erotic suspense.

In this episode of UNC-TV's local literary series North Carolina Bookwatch, premiering Friday, September 1, at 9:30 PM, Gurganus spotlights many of the works from this year's volume that combines seasoned writers like Tony Earley, Wendell Berry, and George Singleton with gifted newcomers, including Keith Lee Morris, Erin Brooks Worley and J. D. Chapman and sheds light on his own introduction to editing the New Stories from the South.

"It's always fun to be able to exchange hats," says Gurganus. "As you know, Shannon Ravenel has done this for 20 years-pouring over hundreds and hundreds of short stories and choosing 13 or 14. I suppose she's reached the point where she says it's time to pass on the baton-and so it fell to me. and I think part of being a good citizen in the literary community not only involves being in this 'Miss America Pageant,' but judging it."

The stories Gurganus selected range from a communal love poem for a hunting dog, to a tale of a newly rich retiree trying to micromanage a Hollywood movie and losing his trophy wife to each new young screenwriter, to a harrowing work about a Virginia slave-woman burned alive for witchcraft-a labor of love shared in this special one-on-one interview.

"I have always published stories and it's a form I really love. It may be the hardest of all forms," says Gurganus. "In a novel, you have the next chapter to get right and one chapter can be a little weaker as long as the strong brother and sister on either side is holding him up.  But a story is like a poem-it has to come out in a single breath; it has to contain all of the necessary information, but not weigh itself down; it has to appear a spontaneous kind of outburst. And it's very, very hard to make it feel effortless."

Allan Gurganus' first novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, won the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, was a New York Times bestseller, and has been translated into twelve languages. His novel, White People, was the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a PEN/Faulkner Finalist.  The Practical Heart: Four Novellas, was a Lambda Literary Award winner. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review, and been anthologized in the O'Henry Prize Collection, Best American Short Stories, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, as well as the New Stories from the South series.  Gurganus is a 2006 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow.

Don't miss D.G. Martin's all-new interview with Allan Gurganus on North Carolina Bookwatch, Friday, September 1, at 9:30 PM, with an encore episode airingSunday, September 3, at 5 PM,only on UNC-TV!

During this season of North Carolina Bookwatch, guests also include: Will Blythe (To Hate Like This is to be Happy Forever), John Hart (TheKing of Lies), Sarah Dessen (Just Listen), Kristin Henderson (While They're at War), David Payne (Back to Wando Passo), John Hope Franklin (Mirror to America), Leah Stewart (The Myth of You and Me), Andrew Britton (The American), Tom Carlson (Hatteras Blues), Bill Smith (Seasoned in the South), William Leuchtenburg (The White House Looks South), Dot Jackson (Refuge), Art Chansky (Blue Blood), Mark Ethridge (Grievances),  Paul Leonard (Music of a Thousand Hammers), and Angela Davis-Gardner (Plum Wine).

For more information about additional series guests and airdates, plus, the all-new Bookwatch blog and online book club, please visit: www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch.

Funding for North Carolina Bookwatch is provided by UNC-TV members and by Quail Ridge Books and Music, Raleigh's independent, full service bookstore, bringing readers and writers together since 1984.

North Carolina Bookwatch is part of UNC-TV's ongoing commitment to produce programs for and about North Carolina. UNC-TV is the statewide 11-station broadcast network of the University of North Carolina. For more information, please visit www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch.

For more information about North Carolina Bookwatch and UNC-TV's other local productions, please visit our website at www.unctv.org.

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