Posted by Tobias Carroll

Over at his blog Wing & Fly, THE2NDHAND editor Todd Dills brings news of a second anthology of work from said literary broadsheet, with a Kickstarter campaign to come. In the same post comes an excerpt from a longer work-in-progress, touching on NASCAR pit crews, performance art, and cities in North Carolina. Here’s one bit:

Charlotte wasn’t exactly all open arms and jubilation for me, in essence. All the same, the context for my return afforded entrée into a world I’d never known there. The ramshackle structures into which I was thrown as member of a NASCAR pit crew–socially, I mean, structures of meeting and greeting near nonexistent, a man a man not if he had the wits to outsmart Zeus but rather if he had the physical strength to best whatever foe happened to be standing in his way, whether three-foot concrete wall, rival for a woman’s affections or unemployed former tire carrier–carried enough a priori respect to make it fun to worry about keeping oneself fed and clothed and suited. A little fun, anyway. Not that the last required much worrying.

As someone quite fond of Dills’s 2006 novel Sons of the Rapture — hallucinatory and wrenching in what looks to this Jersey boy like the finest Southern literary tradition — this is fine news. And if you’re not familiar with the novel in question, I’d highly recommend giving it a read.