Fall Line Paperback Forthcoming

I’m excited to announce that Fall Line, my second novel initially published in 2011, will be reissued in paperback in April 2026 by the University of Georgia Press imprint NewSouth Books. The new edition’s cover features a drawing by my good friend and exceptionally talented artist Lee Allen Wells. 

(It is available for preorder at UGA Press, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop, IndieBound, and many other spots where books are sold.)

Lee read the manuscript years ago before it was initially published. His drawing envisions the book’s dog, Percy, beside character Elmer Blizzard’s 1950 Chevrolet 3100 pickup truck, as well as the new dam around which the story’s plot revolves. I’m thrilled with the cover design that UGA Press put together using Lee’s drawing.

Fall Line earned praise from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which called it a “quiet dazzler of a new novel,” in March 2012. 

Reviewer Gina Webb wrote: "Of all the contemporary Southern novels today that draw comparisons to Faulkner and O’Connor, Starnes’ tale may be one of the few that deserves them. The unsentimental but glorious world seen through the eyes of a “half mutt half chow” fearful of man and guns is pure Faulkner. Elmer, condemning the bigwigs around him for “their fondness for impure women and liquor and money and the love of their own images reflected in shiny glass,” echoes the righteous, scathing hatred of Hazel Motes (Wise Blood)."

The novel was included in the paper’s “Year in Review: Best of the South” list later that year.