About the book

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.

Published by Loblolly Press, August 6, 2026.

Get the book: https://www.loblollypress.com/products/slow-fire

About the guests

Spencer K.M. Brown is an award-winning novelist and poet from the foothills of North Carolina. A finalist for the CMA National Book Awards and winner of the Penelope Niven Award and the Flying South Fiction Prize, he’s been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize. He’s the author of the novels Move Over Mountain and Hold Fast and the poetry chapbook Cicada Rex. His Southern Gothic novel Recommendations for a Departing Soul is forthcoming from Regal House. He lives with his wife and three sons. Slow Fire is his first collection of stories.

Bradley Sides is the author of the short story collections Those Fantastic Lives and Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood, a 2024 Book of the Year finalist at Southern Literary Review. His fiction has been featured on LeVar Burton Reads, and his reviews, interviews, and essays appear at Chapter 16, Electric Literature, The Millions, The Rumpus, and Southern Review of Books, where he hosts “The Southern Summer Book Club.” His novella The Volcano Keeper is forthcoming from Regal House. He lives in Madison, Alabama, and teaches writing and literature at Calhoun Community College.

Listen & subscribe

Loblolly Press: In Conversation is a literary podcast rooted in the American South and reaching beyond. We are not here to define Southern literature. We are here to expand what it can hold.

Watch the video version on the Southern Review of Books YouTube channel:

Recorded for The Southern Summer Book Club at Southern Review of Books. Hosted by Bradley Sides. Guest: Spencer K.M. Brown.

Get full access to Loblolly Press on Substack at loblollypress.substack.com/subscribe