Heather Newton’s “McMullen Circle” Brings Characters in a Small Town to Life

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In this episode 278, we visit with Heather Newton, author of “McMullen Circle,” a collection of connected short stories, and finalist for the W.S. Porter Prize.

In 1969, as Karl Wallenda prepares to tight-rope walk across the gorge in the tiny town of Tonola Falls, Georgia, faculty families at the McMullen Boarding School learn about racism, war, and what makes a hero.

Wiley Cash, New York Times bestselling author of A Land More Kind Than Home, had this to say about the book:”These deeply literary, heartfelt, and heartbreaking characters call to mind the work of Elizabeth Strout, Gail Godwin, and Richard Russo, but Heather Newton is her own writer. Her characters are shot through with longing and hope, and in this small community we watch as big dreams and big desires are dreamed and felt, run toward and away from. This is the kind of book that readers return to to reemerge themselves in Newton’s world, and it’s also the kind of book that writers return to to see how she pulled it off.”

Connect With the Author

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About the Author:

Heather Newton’s short story collection McMullen Circle, finalist for the W.S. Porter prize, is forthcoming from Regal House in January 2022. Her novel The Puppeteer’s Daughters is forthcoming from Turner Publishing in July 2022 and has been optioned for television.

Her novel Under The Mercy Trees (HarperCollins 2011) won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award, was chosen by the Women’s National Book Association as a Great Group Reads Selection and named an “Okra Pick” by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance.

A practicing attorney, she teaches creative writing for UNC-Asheville’s Great Smokies Writing Program and is co-founder and Program Manager for the Flatiron Writers Room writers’ center in Asheville.

More Praise for the book:

“Clear-sighted, restrained, deceptively simple, and eternally charitable, the stories that comprise McMullen Circle cohere deftly to create a devastating, life-affirming, vibrating, multi-voiced whole.”

-Jen Fawkes, author of Mannequin and Wife

“At turns dreamy and dark, Newton turns a deft eye toward the inhabitants of a small southern town on the cusp of turmoil–both in their inner lives and in the changing world around them–leaving the reader entranced.”

-Kelly J. Ford, author of Cottonmouths

“Heather Newton is a beautiful writer and McMullen Circle is a beautiful book, written with compassion, humor and unflinching honesty. I love these stories, and as standalone pieces, each is a compelling in its own way, often breathtakingly so. And read as a whole, the stories transcend the individual characters, offering a complex, conflicted and empathetic portrait of this North Georgia boarding school and its community. The whole time I was reading McMullen Circle, I was reminded again and again of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.”

-Tommy Hays, author of The Pleasure Was Mine

“In McMullen Circle, Heather Newton’s riveting novel in short story form, compelling and believably flawed characters inhabit Tonola Falls, Georgia, a small town on the cusp of integration. In a dozen connected stories, Newton weaves a tapestry of rich irony with fierce emotion and genuine bewilderment. Ordinary people, animated with astounding power, confront their weaknesses and principles in a baffling, rapidly changing world. Empathy and insight are forces as powerful as the stone mountain that supports and looms over these unforgettable stories.”

-Anna Jean Mahew

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