Spencer K.M. Brown presents SLOW FIRE with Alice Martin
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Spencer K.M. Brown will visit City Lights on Saturday, August 8th at 3:00pm to share his new story collection, Slow Fire, in conversation with Alice Martin.
From award-winning author Spencer K.M. Brown, SLOW FIRE is a collection of Southern stories about people living at the edge of belief—religious, familial, and personal—where grace is rare, suffering is ordinary, and endurance becomes a quiet form of love.
Set among frozen hollers, decaying motels, burning fields, and small towns hungry for spectacle, these stories follow mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, preachers and murderers, and outcasts and wanderers confronting loss, disability, violence, and moral uncertainty. A woman watches her past collapse beneath the blade of a bulldozer. A self-anointed preacher nails himself to a cross, convinced the end has arrived, only to discover that the world, indifferent and unrepentant, continues without him.
Fire and snow recur as elemental forces throughout the collection, promising cleansing, preservation, or erasure. Animals move through the margins as witnesses. Children observe with unsettling clarity. Families and communities strain under inherited pressure, while would-be heroes falter. What endures are small acts of care, practiced without audience or reward.
Written in a clean and lyrical voice, SLOW FIRE examines faith without romance, suffering without self-pity, and love as something practiced daily rather than proclaimed. Redemption here is not spectacle. It arrives through survival, attention, and the stubborn refusal to abandon grace—or one another.
Spencer K. M. Brown is a finalist for the 2023 CMA National Book Award for “Best Novel,” winner of the 2016 Penelope Niven Award, the 2018 Flying South Fiction Prize, and a finalist for both the 2019 Doris Betts Fiction Prize and the 2019 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize. His short fiction and poems have four times been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and have appeared in numerous publications. He lives in North Carolina, with his wife and three sons. He is the author of the novels Move Over Mountain and Hold Fast, and one chapbook of poetry, Cicada Rex. His debut collection of stories Slow Fire is forthcoming from Loblolly Press, Fall 2026.
Alice Martin is a writer, reader, and teacher from North Carolina. She holds a PhD in Literature from Rutgers University and works as an Assistant Professor of English Studies at Western Carolina University, where she teaches fiction writing and American literature. She lives outside of Asheville, North Carolina with her husband, her son, and too many typewriters. Westward Women is her debut novel.
From award-winning author Spencer K.M. Brown, SLOW FIRE is a collection of Southern stories about people living at the edge of belief—religious, familial, and personal—where grace is rare, suffering is ordinary, and endurance becomes a quiet form of love.
Set among frozen hollers, decaying motels, burning fields, and small towns hungry for spectacle, these stories follow mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, preachers and murderers, and outcasts and wanderers confronting loss, disability, violence, and moral uncertainty. A woman watches her past collapse beneath the blade of a bulldozer. A self-anointed preacher nails himself to a cross, convinced the end has arrived, only to discover that the world, indifferent and unrepentant, continues without him.
Fire and snow recur as elemental forces throughout the collection, promising cleansing, preservation, or erasure. Animals move through the margins as witnesses. Children observe with unsettling clarity. Families and communities strain under inherited pressure, while would-be heroes falter. What endures are small acts of care, practiced without audience or reward.
Written in a clean and lyrical voice, SLOW FIRE examines faith without romance, suffering without self-pity, and love as something practiced daily rather than proclaimed. Redemption here is not spectacle. It arrives through survival, attention, and the stubborn refusal to abandon grace—or one another.
Spencer K. M. Brown is a finalist for the 2023 CMA National Book Award for “Best Novel,” winner of the 2016 Penelope Niven Award, the 2018 Flying South Fiction Prize, and a finalist for both the 2019 Doris Betts Fiction Prize and the 2019 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize. His short fiction and poems have four times been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and have appeared in numerous publications. He lives in North Carolina, with his wife and three sons. He is the author of the novels Move Over Mountain and Hold Fast, and one chapbook of poetry, Cicada Rex. His debut collection of stories Slow Fire is forthcoming from Loblolly Press, Fall 2026.
Alice Martin is a writer, reader, and teacher from North Carolina. She holds a PhD in Literature from Rutgers University and works as an Assistant Professor of English Studies at Western Carolina University, where she teaches fiction writing and American literature. She lives outside of Asheville, North Carolina with her husband, her son, and too many typewriters. Westward Women is her debut novel.
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Where is it happening?
3 East Jackson Street, Sylva, NC, United States, North Carolina 28779
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.
Host or PublisherCity Lights Bookstore
