The Aliens Will Come to Georgia First (Paperback or Softback)

The Aliens Will Come to Georgia First is the debut short fiction collection by Stephen Hundley that showcases sixteen bizarre, hard-loving stories set in the foothills, pinelands, low country, and barrier islands of Georgia and a few other places too. Hundley's men and women grapple with death, distant lovers, damaged families as well as sharks, stray dogs, and man-eating tigers, while exploring questions of belonging and duty to people and place. A man discovers an abandoned child at a flea market. A diver visits a sleeping nuclear bomb just a mile from the beach. A woman prophesizes visitors from the stars. This collection works to make the familiar new, and to introduce fantasy and science fiction spurs to the Southern literary tradition.

In "Settled," winner of the 2019 Larry Brown Short Story Award, a town is evacuated before a planned flood, but some citizens decide to affix pontoons to the bottom of their house and ride out the storm. While the diner is ripped apart for sport by bored deputies, and wild animals flee the woods, a man moves the grave of his son to higher ground and pleads with his estranged wife to leave for safety, but the forces of guilt and grief compel her to stay, even as the feral dogs howl and the helicopters circle and the flood waters prepare to tear it all away. Hundley brings his characters to the breaking point, where the choices are extreme, and there isn't always a clean way out. The forces in this world inflict brutal wounds and leave their victims estranged and confused. All that remains is the connection of homeplace and the forgiveness they offer, or withhold, from the ones they love.

The Aliens Will Come to Georgia First offers an intimate glimpse into a working class and American South populated by men and women who have made themselves acolytes of existential powers-atomic bombs and aliens, the ocean and desperate love. This is a book for dreamers and space cadets, for fighters and providers, for anyone who believes in a connection between the places we come from and the people we become.

Stephen Hundley was raised on the Lincoln River, outside of Richmond Hill, Georgia, where he worked, for a time, as a journalist before earning his bachelor's degree in English from Georgia College & State University. For the next two years, Hundley served as a Teach For America corps member and an environmental science teacher in a high school near Charlotte, North Carolina before leaving the United States to teach English language learners in Seoul, South Korea. After returning to America, Hundley earned a master's degree in English from Clemson University, where he took on a study of contemporary fiction, forming relationships with professional writers, academics, and literary magazines. The eldest stories in The Aliens Will Come to Georgia First were written in this period, sketched out on coffee shop receipts and napkins in Upstate South Carolina, where authors Keith Lee Morris, Nic Brown, and Dan Leach (Floods and Fires, UNG Press 2019) gifted hours of revision and critique to the collection, then just a handful of stories, and encouraged Hundley to continue writing. In Oxford, Mississippi, Hundley joined a cohort of fiction writers in the University of Mississippi's MFA program, where he was awarded a Richard Ford Fellowship and where The Aliens Will Come to Georgia First became a complete manuscript and then a book under the guidance of the graduate workshop and authors Tom Franklin, Chris Offutt, Matt Bondurant, Melissa Ginsburg, and visiting Grisham Scholar, Garth Greenwell. Hundley lives now in Oxford, Mississippi, teaching Young Writer's Workshops and creative writing classes, online and in person, working as a magazine editor for The Swamp and Driftwood Press, and editing his newest work, a psychedelic thriller set on an island on the Georgia-Florida line.