Welcome to the dream world. What you are about to encounter is the unfiltered stuff of the dream, and that is wild, terrifying, provocative, and unsettling material. In this volume, some of the best living Southern writers are offering up a feast of their dreams, wonderful and awful in equal measure, for you to enjoy. These dream stories and poems will tell you what you have always known, but what you are too afraid to say out loud in the full light of day: that we are a race of chimeras, beings made up of the incompatible parts of innumerable mutually antagonistic creatures. Our pieces do...

"Sublimity, as we choose to define it, is that quality a story possesses when it is, in its entirety, completely unpredictable as well as completely inevitable and authentic.... A story-a real story, of the type that weve gathered here; not the mock-stories, the painless, bloodless vignettes that make up so much of todays "literary" fiction-involves apocalypse. Apocalypse means a revelation (the literal meaning of the word apocalypse is a "lifting of the veil"), and a very specific type of revelation: the destruction of an old order, followed by a time of disorder and chaos, and the...

This is the third and, in our humble opinion, the best, densest, and most exciting edition of the Surreal South anthology series. When we began this series, with the original Surreal South in 2007 (we did not know then, though we hoped, that it would be followed by Surreal South 09 and now this third volume), we wished to put together a book that in some sense bridged the gap between work that is perceived as literary and work that is perceived as genre. The first category is, as we take it, defined primarily by the excellence of its execution and the loftiness of its ambition. The second...