Works by
T. R. Pearson
(Aka Thomas Reid Pearson)
(Writer)
[1956 - ]

Fiction

• Red Scare: A Novel of Venomous Intrigue (2008)
  From the acclaimed author of A Short History of a Small Place and Seaworthy comes a wholesale departure -- a comic/horror/romance/fantasy infested with both unsavory American politicians and venomous Venetian lizards. Awash in Pearson’s singular wit, Red Scare tells the headlong story of a public school biology teacher and a National Gallery curator who join forces to thwart the dire consequences of a medieval Italian curse. This novel, though slender, is packed to overflowing with priapic senators, clueless teenagers, dubious art history, clumsy quasi-romantic repartee, garish worldwide bloodletting, corrosive humor, and enough malicious scuttling reptiles to keep you from ever planting your bare feet on a darkened floor again. We’re pleased to offer Red Scare at a special thanks-for-your-ongoing-support price.

• Glad News of the Natural World (2005)
  Now, older but not necessarily wiser, Louis Benfield returns in Glad News of the Natural World. Having moved to New York City from his hometown of Neely, North Carolina, in order to get a sense of the larger world, Louis is a modern-day Candide, looking for love and experience in all the wrong places. However, when tragedy strikes, he finds the maturity needed to be more than man enough for the job.

• True Cross (2003)
  Paul Tatum is a small-town accountant. He stands at a comfortable remove from the rest of the world, even from his clients, who trust him to make fiscal, sometimes emotional, sense of their lives. His neighbor Stoney, a local fix-it man, is even more of a recluse. Their "friendship" consists mostly of nonverbal companionship, but when the two men become fixated on a local damsel in distress, Paul goads Stoney into an inexorable course of action that will have tragic consequences for all. Ranging from rural Virginia to Venice, True Cross is Pearson at his best.

• Polar (2002)
  With this bittersweet tale of Deputy Ray Tatum's search for a missing child in the wilds of the Virginia Blue Ridge, T. R. Pearson revisits the seamier side of the South. Among the local citizens are Ray's hothead girlfriend, his ill-tempered mongrel, and, most significantly, Clayton, a ne'er-do-well who is notorious for his devotion to pornographic movies. But Clayton has suddenly undergone a personality change: he asks to be called "Titus" and seems able to predict the future-though in random and meaningless ways. As Ray unravels the mystery of Clayton's condition and thereby closes in on his quarry, the story moves to its surprising end, never losing the poignant magical realism that is a Pearson trademark.

• Blue Ridge (2000)
  Ever since A Short History of a Small Place, T. R. Pearson has captivated readers. In his seventh novel, Blue Ridge, Ray Tatum is the new deputy sheriff of Hogarth, Virginia, located in the middle of nowhere with "nothing too awful gaudy afoot" until the discovery of a nearly complete set of human bones on the Appalachian Trail. Meanwhile, Ray's cousin Paul is summoned to New York to identify another body-the corpse of his son, whom he scarcely knew.

• Cry Me a River (1993)
  In a novel about murder and its consequences in a small Southern town, a local policeman uses his understanding of the dark passions that sometimes guide the human heart to investigate the brutal slaying of his colleague.

• Gospel Hour (1991)

• Call and Response (1989)

Neely, North Carolina Trilogy

1. A Short History of a Small Place (1985)
   Marvelously funny, bittersweet, and beautifully evocative, the original publication of A Short History of a Small Place announced the arrival of one of our great Southern voices. Although T. R. Pearson's Neely, North Carolina, doesn't appear on any map of the state, it has already earned a secure place on the literary landscape of the South. In this introduction to Neely, the young narrator, Louis Benfield, recounts the tragic last days of Miss Myra Angelique Pettigrew, a local spinster and former town belle who, after years of total seclusion, returns flamboyantly to public view-with her pet monkey, Mr. Britches. Here is a teeming human comedy inhabited by some of the most eccentric and endearing characters ever encountered in literature.
    Marvelously funny, bittersweet, and beautifully evocative, the original publication of A Short History of a Small Place announced the arrival of one of our great Southern voices. Although T. R. Pearson's Neely, North Carolina, doesn't appear on any map of the state, it has already earned a secure place on the literary landscape of the South. In this introduction to Neely, the young narrator, Louis Benfield, recounts the tragic last days of Miss Myra Angelique Pettigrew, a local spinster and former town belle who, after years of total seclusion, returns flamboyantly to public view-with her pet monkey, Mr. Britches. Here is a teeming human comedy inhabited by some of the most eccentric and endearing characters ever encountered in literature.
   Buy Video.

2. Off for the Sweet Hereafter (1986)

3. The Last of How It Was (1987)
   
   The last volume in an unforgettable trilogy (with

Non-fiction

• Seaworthy: Adrift with William Willis in the Golden Age of Rafting (2006)
  Welcome to the daring, thrilling, and downright strange adventures of William Willis, one of the world’s original extreme sportsmen. Driven by an unfettered appetite for personal challenge and a yen for the path of most resistance, Willis mounted a single-handed and wholly unlikely rescue in the jungles of French Guiana and then twice crossed the broad Pacific on rafts of his own design, with only housecats and a parrot for companionship. His first voyage, atop a ten-ton balsa monstrosity, was undertaken in 1954 when Willis was sixty. His second raft, having crossed eleven thousand miles from Peru, found the north shore of Australia shortly after Willis’s seventieth birthday. A marvel of vigor and fitness, William Willis was a connoisseur of ordeal, all but orchestrating short rations, ship-wreck conditions, and crushing solitude on his trans-Pacific voyages.
  
  He’d been inspired by Kon-Tiki, Thor Heyerdahl’s bid to prove that a primitive raft could negotiate the open ocean. Willis’s trips confirmed that a primitive man could as well. Willis survived on rye flour and seawater, sang to keep his spirits up, communicated with his wife via telepathy, suffered from bouts of temporary blindness, and eased the intermittent pain of a double hernia by looping a halyard around his ankles and dangling upside-down from his mast.
  
  Rich with vivid detail and wry humor, Seaworthy is the story of a sailor you’ve probably never heard of but need to know. In an age when countless rafts were adrift on the waters of the world, their crews out to shore up one theory of ethno-migration or tear down another, Willis’s challenges remained refreshingly personal. His methods were eccentric, his accomplishments little short of remarkable. Don’t miss the chance to meet this singular monk of the sea.