LITMIR.BIZ

Ted Dunagan, named 2009 Georgia Author of the Year in the young adult category for his debut novel A Yellow Watermelon, continues the saga of two adventuresome boys in this sequel, Secret of the Satilfa. Both books are set squarely in the Southern literary tradition as they reveal the lives of young Ted and Poudlum, friends despite the racial divide in rural Alabama in the late 1940s. In the fall of 1948, Ted and Poudlum have their post-Thanksgiving fishing trip to the Cypress Hole on the Satilfa Creek interrupted by unwelcome visitors – fugitive bank robbers. They manage to escape and return to the Satilfa to search – along with seemingly half the locals – for money rumored to have been hidden by the criminals. However, Ted and Poudlum have a clue no one else possesses. Through their exposure to some memorable individuals, the boys grow in character and knowledge as they hunt for the missing treasure.

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William Cobb's first novel in nine years is a brilliant, quirky, highly readable story as compelling as it is original. Its main characters journey on parallel quests: Lester Ray, a fourteen-year-old boy who was deserted by his mother when he was a baby and has now escaped his abusive alcoholic father, and Minnie, a woman who was abandoned by her Gypsy family of migrant fruit pickers when she was eleven. The novel interweaves their searches for families they never really knew. It ranges from the Great Depression to the mid-1960s, and from the panhandle of Florida, where much of the novel is set, to New York City during World War II, to the Georgia and Carolina coasts, to Fort Myers and south Florida. Lester Ray finds work with a carnival as he looks for his mother, accompanied by all the odd and strange and wonderful people who make up that world. Minnie moves from the dry sandy heat of central Florida in 1933, to a brothel in Cedar Key, to New York, to the little town of Piper, to the winter camps of the Gypsies near Fort Myers. She is–first as a girl, then as a woman–a person of immense fortitude and strength, as engaging and unforgettable as Scarlett O'Hara.

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America seems to have little sense of how the Civil Rights Movement actually played into southern politics over the remainder of the twentieth Century. The common vision is a monolithic struggle between heroes and villains, depicted literally and figuratively in black and white. Unfortunately, this conception provides incomplete explanation for subsequent progress in the southern political system. This book reveals that, amid all the heroic history of that time, there is a fascinating story of “stealth reconstruction” – i.e., the unheroic, quiet, practical, biracial work of some white politicians and black leaders, a story untold and unknown until now.

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This provocative novel takes the reader on a wild ride inside the mind of a Mississippi Delta good-old-boy ex-deputy sheriff who is as vicious and racist as the worst 1950s-’60s stereotypes. Junior Ray Loveblood narrates the story in his own profane, colloquial voice, telling why he hates just about everybody and why he wants to shoot Leland Shaw, a shell-shocked World War II hero and poet who is hiding in a silo from what he believes are German patrols. Through a series of sleights of hand, misdirections, and near misses, Junior Ray and his sidekick Voyd give a dark tour of the Delta country as they chase their mysterious prey. Junior Ray’s thoughts are peppered with excerpts from Shaw’s notebooks – sometimes starkly different from Junior Ray’s diatribe, sometimes eerily similar—and by the end of the story, it is up to the reader to sort out whose reality is more fantastic, Shaw’s or Loveblood’s, as the one stalks the other through the pages of this highly original and darkly comedic story.

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”Discovering Alabama” producer Roger Reid, author of acclaimed novel Longleaf, continues the saga of teenage sleuth Jason Caldwell in his new mystery adventure Space. Set at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, Space is a fast-moving story that incorporates factual information about astronomy and America’s space program into its intriguing tale of suspicion and pursuit. This witty and educational book will captivate middle-school readers of all ages. Jason leads the audience through an engaging story combining intelligence, courage and insight. The story communicates values of empathy and integrity as Jason struggles to understand his acerbic sidekick and makes promises to respect the confidence of others. An engaging combination of scientific facts and exciting adventure.

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Junior Ray Loveblood, one of the most outrageous and original personalities to appear in American literature in many years, returns in The Yazoo Blues, the sequel to John Pritchard’s Junior Ray. Now semi-retired, Loveblood works as a security guard in one of the floating casinos that have replaced cotton as the cash crop in the Mississippi Delta. In his spare time, Junior Ray has become obsessed with the ill-fated Yazoo Pass expedition by a Union armada up the Mississippi River in 1863. He relates dual stories, both that of a soldier slowly driven mad by the haunting countryside, and of Loveblood’s friend Mad Owens, whose search for existential love meets its greatest challenge in the arms of the stripper Money Scatters. Loveblood’s conclusions are hilarious, absurd, and at times intensely revealing. Equally profane and profound, the fictional narrator of Pritchard’s novel illuminates the complex stew of evolving race relations, failed economies, and corrupt politics that define much of the post-civil rights rural Deep South.

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Publisher’s Weekly hailed the “wit and subtlety” in Gerald Duff’s fiction as “simply satisfying as a tall cold one on a hot Gulf Coast afternoon,” and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazetter said “Gerald Duff’s dialogue is among the best being written, and his sense of the absurd is Portis-like.” This new collection of short stories by the author of Coasters (2001) features the Ploughshares Cohen Prize-winning story “Fire Ants.”

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On the Hills of God describes the year-long journey of a boy becoming a man, while all that he has known crumbles to ashes. The novel has been translated into German and Arabic and won the PEN Oakland Award for literary excellence. Critic Ishmael Reed calls it “a monumental book.” This revised edition includes a new introduction. When we first encounter Palestinian Yousif Safi in June 1947, he is filled with hopes for his education abroad to study law, and with daydreams of his first love, the beautiful Salwa. But as the future of Palestine begins to look bleak due to the pressure on the United Nations from the international Zionist movement, Yousif is frustrated by his fellow Arabs' inability to thwart the Zionist encroachment and by his own inability to prevent the impending marriage of Salwa to an older suitor chosen by her parents. As Palestinians face the imminent establishment of Israel, Yousif resolves to face his own responsibilities of manhood. Despite the monumental odds against him, Yousif vows to win back both his loves – Salwa and Palestine – and create his world anew.

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For more than twenty years, the murder of a thirteen-year-year-old boy during racial unrest in rural South Carolina has gone unpunished, unsolved, even uninvestigated. But that changes when Charlotte Times reporter Matt Harper sits down with a fellow who shows up in the newsroom, a guy with a grievance. As he struggles with his journalistic legacy, Harper comes to understand why the investigation must be pursued and why he must be the one to do it—despite the opposition of his publisher, violent threats from mysterious forces who do not want the story told, and the fact that his father is dying. Set in the rich scenery of a Savannah River town that time and justice have forgotten, Grievances is a story of newspapers, murder, and of redemption—for a small Southern town and for Matt Harper.

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In the eighteen stories in this retrospective of his best short fiction, Dale Short shows why he is one of the best prose stylists of his generation and why he deserves a break-out success. Short's writing has been hailed by Wally Lamb as “simultaneously mythical and modern; a wild ride,” and Dennis Covington has called him “wise and compassionate, a major Southern writer.” He writes here from many perspectives—male, female, first person, third person, grieving widow, newly divorced dad, jailed redneck, river man laid up with heart trouble, conjure woman—and in every story the voice is as true as that of a child and as clear as fresh ice. The marvel of Short's prose is that the writing is so good it disappears, leaving the reader surrounded only by the story, which resonates long after the last word is absorbed. The other remarkable thing is how Short can go from comedy to tragedy within a single paragraph, sometimes within a single sentence, and then back again. His time lines here range from the Civil War to the near future, and the locales vary from a Kentucky mining town to the Gulf Coast of Mexico to the constellation Orion—all in all, a rare feast for the imagination. Stories that have appeared before only in magazines, this collection charts more than two decades of the growth and exploration of an author who won the first Redbook Fiction Prize at the age of twenty-seven, and whose acclaimed novel The Shining Shining Path was called by reviewers “Southern magical realism” and praised by Publishers Weekly as “boldly imaginative; a provocative spiritual odyssey.” Publishers Weekly added, “Short takes risks in a single paragraph that many writers never attempt in an entire novel.”

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