Smell the Bright Cold

a novel by

Robert Wallace

~280 pages, $18.95 (+ shipping)

Projected Release Date: June/July 2025

An Advance Sale Discount price of $11 (+ shipping) is available HERE prior to press time. This price is not available anywhere else or by check. The check price is $16/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412. 

PLEASE NOTE: Ordering in advance of the release date entitles the buyer to a discount. It does not mean the book will ship before the date posted above and the price only applies to copies ordered through the Main Street Rag Online Bookstore.

Robert Wallace has received a Writers’ Fellowship from the NC Arts Council. He is a two-time winner of the Doris Betts’ Fiction Prize. Wallace’s novel, A Hold on Time, was published in 2007 by Paper Journey Press. His short story collection As Breaks the Wave Upon the Sea was published by the Main Street Rag in 2021. He has been critiquing manuscripts for the North Carolina Writers’ Network for the past twenty-five years.

In this brilliant companion text to The Sound and the Fury, Robert Wallace gives voice to Caddy Compson, imagining remarkable new adventures for her spanning from New York to Miami to Rome. Wallace’s radiant prose depicts a young woman grappling with her place in her family and the world at large. Smell the Bright Cold is a luminous novel that lingers after you have turned the last page. ~Heather Bell Adams, author of Maranatha Road

First, Robert Wallace’s novel tells a bevy of stories and tells them well. Second, fans of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury will find a literary treat upon realizing Caddy Compson has finally been given the opportunity to tell her own story. In a tour de force, Wallace weaves Caddy’s numerous narrative threads through and beyond the scopes of Faulkner’s book, which, perhaps most happily, is not required reading for Smell the Bright Cold. ~Scott Peterson