Stephen Hundley in Conversation with Kate McMullen

Friday, September 20th at 6 PM meet us at Hub City Bookshop with Stephen Hundley who will be conversing with Hub City Press Managing Editor Kate McMullen about Hundley's new book Bomb Island. Part coming-of-age romance, part thriller, Bomb Island is a funny and fast-paced Southern summer novel exploring sub-culture communities, survival, and found family set on an island near an unexploded atomic bomb.

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Get a 10% discount on the book when you purchase a copy on Eventbrite.

Summer is in full swing on Bomb Island, Georgia. Fifteen-year-old Fish lives in a commune on the three-mile stretch of sand with his chosen family: their “mother-sage” Whistle and her white tiger, Sugar, a young man named Reef, and an old man named Nutzo, who is still missing. Fish and Whistle spend the days leading tours in their glass bottom boat out to the barrier island’s namesake, an unexploded atomic bomb.

This is the summer when Fish meets Celia, the tattooed daughter of a troublesome local charter fisherman bent on exposing Whistle’s commune—and their illegal tiger. When a party at her dad’s place goes sour, Fish brings Celia back to Bomb Island in the hope that she’ll stay there with him. But they still can’t find Nutzo, the tiger’s behavior has become increasingly erratic, and everyone’s summer is about to take a strange, dark turn.

Narrated by an ensemble cast of uniquely independent outsiders who have chosen counter-culture lives informed by their desires and past traumas, Bomb Island takes a rollicking journey through the weirds and wilds of Coastal Georgia. Stephen Hundley has crafted a spirited, zany novel with a big heart that examines the strength it takes to live freely and without shame.

Stephen Hundley is the author of The Aliens Will Come to Georgia First (University of North Georgia Press, 2023) and Bomb Island (Hub City Press, 2024). He is a fiction editor at Driftwood Press, a book review editor at the Southeast Review, and his stories and poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Cream City Review, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MA from Clemson, an MFA from the University of Mississippi, and is currently completing a PhD in English at Florida State University.

Kate McMullen is the Managing Editor at Hub City Press. She received her MFA in fiction from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where she worked as the publishing assistant for Lookout Books. Her fiction has appeared in Paper Darts, Carve Magazine, The Boiler, Foglifter, The Pinch, and elsewhere. A Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee, she is the 2015 recipient of UNCW’s Colbert Chapbook Award. Find Kate reading short stories, literary oddities, cookbooks, and true crime. She lives downtown in Spartanburg, SC with her partner.

Event Venue

Hub City Bookshop & Press, 186 West Main Street, Spartanburg, United States