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Praise for SIDESHOW:

Thompson's prose rings simple and direct, his narrative quick and sure. His real gift, though, is an eye for the subtle emotional connections we universally share. And what this Alabama-based writer finds just below the surface of day-to-day existence is a notable discovery--a South to which we can all relate...seen more through the prism of R.E.M. than William Faulkner.
--Paste Magazine

A powerful debut . . . shocking . . . strange . . . tender . . . pitch-perfect.
--Memphis Magazine

Freakishly clever...This book is anything but routine. It is carefully crafted, entertaining, and, at times, unsettling...I must confess that more than once, I felt myself whispering to myself, “Good Lord. Did he just write what I thought he wrote?”
--Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

A literary cross between Paul Bowles and David Lynch...quirkily funny, with oddball characters pursuing bizarre obsessions across the modern Southern landscape...Thompson's abilities shine...a writer very much on task.
--Mobile Press-Register

Sidney Thompson’s collection of 10 stories vividly lives up to its title...mesmerizing...transcendent...a spectacle arising from finely observed and perfectly crafted insights....I cannot imagine how this guy fits so much creative chutzpah inside his head.
--Jackson Free Press

A daring and compulsively entertaining debut...Sidney Thompson tells one hell of a story, full of unlikely characters colliding in precarious positions, sometimes disturbingly, and often hilariously reaching a higher truth.
--Arkansas Review

Sidney Thompson, like Harry Crews, seems alive to the oddness in the world around us, and writes of it frighteningly well.
--Alabama Public Radio

Sidney Thompson's wonderfully desperate and obsessed characters swarm from the page like locusts out of earth. Sideshow offers us both funny and frightening glimpses of the human psyche, of moral and amoral behavior. Unlike a county fairs sideshow wherein viewers get a salacious peek for five minutes then return to the relative safety of an outside world, Thompsons characters linger closer to the reader than a noon shadow. This collection deserves celebratory gunshots into the air, over and over.
--George Singleton, author of The Half-Mammals of Dixie and Why Dogs Chase Cars

In the defuncting and corrupt sideshow that's become the contemporary American South, Sidney Thompson stands yawping there on the corner like a mad preacher, reminding us who the real freaks are. These ten stories--bold, bawdy, sometimes shocking and always hilarious--are so good they ought to be proclaimed though a megaphone. The question might pop into your head as you read: Can he do this? The answer, ladies and gentlemen, is Hell yeah.
--Tom Franklin, author of Poachers and Hell at the Breech

Thompson's wonderful stories prove that often the best way through to the meaningful anarchies of this world is classical restraint. It's beautiful to see the short story hanging tough as a bright form beneath Thompson's hands. And we get to see the famous story bounced from the Atlantic, when it was learned the author was white, victorious now in its resurrection.
--Barry Hannah, author of Airships and Yonder Stands Your Orphan

An eye for color, an ear for language, a sense of motion and a heart for the human condition--that's the fine writing of Sidney Thompson.
--Robert McCammon, author of Boy's Life and Speaks the Nightbird