San Marcos author Jerry Whitus is set to embark on a local book tour in support of his first published work, “The Innocent and Others,” by Stephen F. Austin State University Press.
Featuring 13 evocative short stories, the book includes “A House in the Woods,” in which a young hunter comes upon the body of an old man, sending the boy on a dark journey to a strange house and an even stranger ending. In “We Recruits in Granny Pearl’s Army,” a great-grandmother employs charm and a kind of sorcery to turn her six step-grandchildren against their parents. And in “Bible Music,” a Las Vegas musician, summoned by his vulnerable father, travels home to find the beloved man entangled in a dangerous old-time religious sect. Set in small towns of Texas and Louisiana, the tales in “The Innocent and Others” portray a landscape of bayous, slow rivers, swampland and thickets, with a prose that is lyrical yet economical while conjuring an atmosphere of mystery and witchery.
“In these masterfully- crafted stories, Jerry Whitus writes with tremendous grace and precision about the complex inner lives of his characters: their longings and regrets, their reckonings with the past, their fears about an uncertain future,” Andrew Porter, author of The Disappeared, said. “Like Chekov, he has a remarkable ability to capture the extraordinary in the most ordinary moments of life and imbue these moments with a profound sense of empathy and insight. This is a phenomenal collection, one that will linger in the reader’s mind long after the last page is turned, one that I’ll be revisiting myself for many years to come.”
Born and raised in East Texas, Whitus received a bachelor’s degree in international business and studied American literature and fiction writing in the graduate program at the University of Texas at Austin. His stories have been published in many leading literary journals, including the Chicago Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, the Los Angeles Review and MĀNOA.
Before turning to fiction, he spent years as a freelance writer specializing in film and video for education, industry, government and entertainment.
After receiving a master’s degree in English as a Second Language, he has been a classroom teacher specializing in writing for international students, an administrator and teacher- trainer in colleges and universities in the USA, Japan (where he also served in the U.S. Marine Corps), Singapore, Vietnam (on a USAID grant) and Colombia.
Whitus will appear on Priscilla Leder’s “Bookmark” radio show and will hold author readings in town at a later date. “The Innocent and Others” is available at The Green Heron bookstore as well as on Whitus’ author website, jerrywhitus. wixsite.com/author.
