Arrives Nov. 7, 2023!

FROM THE COVER: Tuesday night is trivia night, a night for produce market owner Lee Hubbs to swing by the bar with his cop friend, a night to down a few shots and avoid all the folks who’ve mysteriously been turning into quails. It’s a night to kick back and maybe get some action on the side from his employee/girlfriend before heading home to his wife and kids. But this Tuesday’s different. An argument with the girlfriend, a little unintentional vehicular homicide of an unsuspecting cyclist, and the next thing you know, Lee’s life’s upended like a bushel of rotten peaches. Well, mostly upended. Because when you’re a fine upstanding citizen, and your victim is a quail-human ne’er-do-well who won’t be missed by society, who’s to say what’s right, really? Jeremy T. Wilson’s The Quail Who Wears the Shirt is a magnificent Southern-fried meditation on guilt and karma, a fantastic and truly memorable work about the lies we tell ourselves and the truths that seep through despite our best efforts, a darkly comedic satire as strange and surreal as an onion pie. PRE-ORDER AT TORTOISE BOOKS

“Jeremy T. Wilson’s witty, dark novel reads like a head-on collision between George Saunders and Erskine Caldwell, and yet is its own totally unique thing. You’ll find Wilson’s surreal vision of Central Georgia sometimes brutal sometimes unexpectedly wise and tender, but always—always—smart, and savagely funny. A terrific book.”

 

— Man Martin, author of The Lemon Jell-O Syndrome and three-time winner of the Georgia Author of the Year Award for Literary Fiction

 

“Jeremy T. Wilson’s delightfully imaginative The Quail Who Wears the Shirt is part redemption tale and part funeral for white Southern masculinity. Lee Hubbs, for all his misdeeds, managed to win me over, in no small part because of Wilson’s exuberant prose, deft characterization, and comic timing. Wilson brings the absurd and the mundane together, driving the story towards a finale you won’t want to miss.”

 

— Rachel Swearingen, author of How to Walk on Water

Stories

FROM THE COVER: A suburban lawyer obsessively searches for her out-of-work husband’s sex doll; a grieving man buys a parrot for the stranger who saved his life; a retired Florida lineman discovers a power more vital than electricity. In his debut collection Adult Teeth, award-winning short story writer Jeremy T. Wilson skillfully presents a cast of compelling characters who grapple with life’s big concerns: marriage, friendship, parenthood, death. With heartbreak and humor, these twelve stories explore the brutal truth that for all these characters, as for all of us, time is lying in wait, ready to punch us in the mouth. ORDER AT TORTOISE BOOKS

“Place is important to stories in Adult Teeth, Jeremy T. Wilson’s artfully crafted first book. But even more than place, the setting for Adult Teeth is that elusive swath of time sometimes referred to as contemporary life. There is absolutely nothing trendy or faddish about Wilson’s work. He’s far too slyly comic and shrewd a writer for that. With his keen eye for detail and an ear for theater-quality dialogue, Wilson draws a credible, tangible surface of recognizable Americans coping with the here and now, and then, once he has the surface right, he transforms it by diving deeper.”

 

— Stuart Dybek, author of Paper Lantern

 

“The stories in Adult Teeth are so smart, so fresh, surprising, and often very funny, that as I read them, I kept thinking, ‘What will Jeremy T. Wilson offer his readers next?’ This is a terrific debut.“

 

— Christine Sneed, author of The Virginity of Famous Men and Little Known Facts