Idiot Men

With Strangers to Temptation, Things that Crash, Things that Fly, and The Hammerhead Chronicles, Scott Gould cemented his reputation as one of the most inventive, distinctive voices of Southern literature. In his latest collection, Idiot Men, he once again gathers a cast of unforgettable characters in eleven stories chock full of exceptional storylines and hilarious writing. 

You’ll meet a truck driver whose wife flees to Jamaica with her lover, leaving him to babysit her hairless tomcat, Princess Di; a male nurse who discovers a trailer full of counterfeit NASCAR paraphernalia during a home health visit; an amateur arsonist sentenced to a year in a Smokey the Bear suit; a disgruntled roofer with a bad back and a meth-dealing twin brother…these are just a few of the idiot men you’ll encounter in a collection of stories that will appeal to readers who relish literature with a Southern flavor.  

Gould's Idiot Men provides the stage for wayward characters who make poor choices in life and love against a backdrop of elegant prose. These tales recalibrate morality and convention as readers will grow to love the characters despite—and perhaps because of—their flaws. These diverse, rich stories are ultimately connected by the spellbinding voice of a true Southern storyteller.  

Available on Bookshop.org, and on Amazon.com.

The Hammerhead Chronicles

The latest novel from critically acclaimed Southern storyteller Scott Gould, The Hammerhead Chronicles explores the effects of grief, racism, homophobia, revenge, love, and loss on an oddball cast of contemporary characters in a small, fictitious South Carolina town . . . oh, and it’s funny.

On the day Claude slaps down a credit card for an expensive racing bicycle, his soon-to-be-ex-wife passes away. As Claude begins a quest to pedal away from his marriage and his grief, we encounter the Southern eccentrics that orbit his world: his overly independent, rebellious teenage daughter; his foul-mouthed sister-in- law who deftly stalks her husband’s mistress; twin, gay bookstore owners who serve the profitable underground Confederacy market out of their “special” back room; the math professor possessing an attic full of rats and a penchant for revenge; a skinny bartender—named for a Marine base—who preaches a suck-it-up philosophy; and Claude’s recently deceased wife, observing it all from the Great Beyond, where she is annoyed by the lack of decent weather and by the troubled, tangled lives she left behind.

This ensemble of quirky, narrative voices dovetail for a fast-moving, comic story of longing and redemption, while flipping a number of Southern clichés on their ears. Available on Bookshop.org, IndieBound.org, and on Amazon.com.

Eric Hoffer Award — 1st Place, General Fiction

Indies Today — 1st Place, Humor

Next Generation Indie Book Awards — 1st Place, Second Novel 

PenCraft Awards — 1st Place, Southern Fiction

Independent Press Awards — Distinguished Favorite, Literary Fiction

Best Book Awards — Finalist, Literary Fiction

American Writing Awards — Finalist, Fiction & Finalist, Humor

Foreward INDIES Awards — Honorable Mention, Humor

Things That Crash, Things That Fly, a memoir

As a husband and wife plan an Italian vacation with friends—to visit her family’s Tuscan village—she makes a last-minute addition to the itinerary: she plans to leave him when they return. And her bombshell includes a caveat. He isn’t allowed to breathe a word of it to their traveling companions. So begins Things That Crash, Things That Fly, the groundbreaking memoir from award-winning writer Scott Gould.

After the awkward vacation with his soon-to-be estranged wife in Serra, Italy, Gould embarks on another, longer journey—through heartbreak and anger, despair and discovery. When he wangles a fellowship to research the death of William Guilfoil, a WWII pilot who crashed in the hills near Serra, Gould sets his sights on clarity and closure in his ex-wife’s ancestral home. As his story and Guilfoil’s intertwine, Gould gathers the fragments of a fractured heart. With a brutal honesty tempered with surprising humor, he tells us how he stitches them back together.

Things That Crash, Things That Fly is about lost love, daughters and fathers, Italian sandals, bad knees, acrobatic birds, oddly placed piercings…but most of all, Gould’s inventive memoir is about how it’s possible to rise and soar, even after you’ve struck the ground.

Independent Press Awards — Distinguished Favorite

Indies Today — Finalist

BookFest Awards — 3rd Place

Whereabouts, the debut novel

Set in the deep South of the 1970’s, Whereabouts is the powerful, coming of age story of Missy Belue, an independent teenager who desperately longs to flee her small, claustrophobic hometown following the unexpected death of her father and her mother’s sudden remarriage to the local funeral director. 

As Missy attempts to map a new course for her young life, her search is constantly derailed by the men she encounters: her mortician step-father with a penchant for chilly women, a much older third cousin who offers to drive her aimlessly in his dusty pickup (for a steep, perhaps tragic price), the quirky owner of an all-but-abandoned roadside motel and a pair of mismatched, AWOL Marines from Parris Island. 

From cheap campgrounds to roadside bars to the cracked Formica counter of a crumbling Li’l Pancake House, Missy Belue wanders the back roads of a forgotten South, looking for a safe place to land, earning fresh scar tissue from the confusing, complicated world outside her hometown. In Whereabouts, award-winning writer Scott Gould lyrically weaves a tale of escape, of redemption and ultimately, of how love somehow survives, no matter the twisting paths it travels.

Independent Publisher Awards — Gold Medal

Independent Press Awards — Distinguished Favorite

Readers’ Favorite Book Awards — Bronze Medal

Shelf Unbound Best Indie Book Competition — Notable Book