Union Ave Books is proud to present An Author Event with Halle Hill to celebrate her debut collection, GOOD WOMEN.
During this event, Halle will be in conversation about GOOD WOMEN with Knoxville's Poet Laureate Rhea Carmon.
This event will take place on September 19, 2023 at 6 pm in our store in downtown Knoxville.
While this is a free event, we ask that you register for your spot AT THIS LINK.
About Halle Hill:
Halle Hill is a writer from East Tennessee. She is a PEN/Dau Short Story Prize nominee, winner of the 2021 Crystal Wilkinson Creative Writing Prize, and a finalist for the 2021 ASME Award for Fiction. Her work is featured in Joyland, New Limestone Review, and Oxford American among others. Her debut collection, Good Women: Stories, will publish with Hub City Press in 2023.
About GOOD WOMEN:
In her dynamic debut, Halle Hill’s Good Women delves into the lives of twelve Black women across the Appalachian South.
A woman boards a Greyhound bus barreling toward Florida to meet her sugar daddy’s mother; a state fair employee considers revenge on a local preacher; a sister struggles with guilt as she helps her brother plan to run away with a man he's seeing in secret; a young woman who works for a scam for-profit college navigates the lies she sells for a living.
Darkly funny and deeply human, Good Women observes how place, blood-ties, generational trauma, obsession, and boundaries—or lack thereof—influence how we navigate our small worlds, and how those worlds so often collide in ways we don’t expect. Through intimate moments of personal choice, Hill carefully shines a light on how these twelve women shape and form themselves through faith and abandon, transgression and conformity, community, caution, and solitude.
With precision and empathy, Hill captures the mundane in moments of absurdity, and bears witness to both joy and heartbreak, reminding us how the next moment could be life-changing. Vibrant and exacting, Hill is a must-read new voice in literary fiction.
Praise for GOOD WOMEN:
“Characters are tormented by pregnancy (unwanted, ill-starred), weight control, evangelical faith, screwed-up mothers and fathers, and police brutality and are unable to find the comfort others do in Pema Chödrön, nontoxic cleaning supplies, or White Claw. A stunning slow burn brimming with observation, emotion, and incident.”
—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
“In Halle Hill's Good Women, we meet mothers and daughters, lovers and friends, saints and aint's––all longing for something, some place, someone. They are curious, messy, and determined, and Hill's fierce and dazzling pen lets us feel every ounce of their complicated desires. Every mistake, every realization, every triumph, every tragedy. This is a fantastic firecracker of a collection I'll return to again and again!”—Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
“In Good Women, Halle Hill gifts us an unflinching peek at women who are trying, women who are aching, women who are running their hands along the walls of their dark hearts, fumbling for the light. Important and beautifully written, this collection is alive with bite and verve tick-tick-ticking on every page.” —Leesa Cross-Smith, author of Whiskey & Ribbons
“Full of fun and tension, Good Women masters the gift of taking your characters seriously. Hill writes with whip, guiding us through the insides of Southern Black women—their weekends, their inner dialogues, their dialect, their flesh, their humaneness—all of which heightens their depth. In this unforgettable debut, Good Women (pun intended) travel viscerally, becoming trapped in your fingertips every time you turn the page.” —Kendra Allen, author of Fruit Punch
“Halle Hill misses nothing, sees everything—Good Women gives witness. These stories are intimate, unbound and Hill delivers them like a wrestled testimony barreling through time. Halle Hill is here, y’all. And Good Women, these stories, these lives, will last and last in all of us.”—Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, author of Sleepovers
“Halle Hill is a major artist, one of the most astounding I know of living today. Good Women, her first collection of stories, sits dominant on the shelf next to the other classic story collections I admire. She’s written a future classic. You’ll see what I mean once you crack it open.”—Bud Smith, author of Teenager
"This heralds a bright new talent." —Publishers Weekly
“This is a collection about awareness and choosing between misery fed by willful ignorance or working toward uncertain change. Introspective and heartbreaking, Good Women showcases the interior lives of women who are near their breaking points.” —Dontaná McPherson-Joseph, Foreword Reviews
