Sideshow

Showcased herein are characters from the schizophrenic melting pot of the modern South--a stage where the urban and the rural, the cultured and the unrefined, privileged and poor, black and white all perform side by side. An airbrush artist learns to counterfeit twenty-dollar bills in a scheme to prove to his estranged wife that he is a genuine artiste; a teenage boy becomes a peeping tom in order to discover the true reasons for his parents' divorce; a father gives his son a classical lesson in logic and revenge by taking him to murder their next-door neighbor; the manager of an apartment complex is caught in a bizarre love triangle with a gorgeous new female tenant and her bedridden seven-hundred-pound husband. This menagerie of misfits serves as a reminder of how freakish we can become when our lives lack truth or love, or when we suddenly discover it.

Sidney Thompson's short fiction has been published in the Southern Review, the Carolina Quarterly, Louisiana Literature, and New Delta Review and has been anthologized in The Alumni Grill, Climbing Mt. Cheaha: Emerging Alabama Authors, and two volumes of Stories from the Blue Moon CafT. He has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and ôThe Good Lieö (published in Sideshow as ôThe Aristotelianö) was awarded third place in Playboy Magazine's College Fiction Contest. He has worked jobs as various as assembling blinkers on tractor trailers, loading and unloading airplanes at Federal Express, teaching world literature at a prep school, and selling new and used cars. Thompson received his M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Arkansas. Born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, he now lives in Point Clear, Alabama, with his wife, novelist Jennifer Paddock.