For readers of Allan Gurganus and John Kennedy Toole, stories set in a small Southern town where a young Jewish doctor tries to bring compassion and science to a cast of misfits, loners, and eccentrics. A one-hundred-and-fourteen-year-old woman living alone, a deaf recluse, a Jewish alligator hunter and his New York wife, a gay African-American drummer, a woman accused of poisoning her husband, a homeless, transgendered person, a woman...